Tribal Thoughts

In early August, I returned to Annapolis from Massachusetts after my two-day trip to get my car inspected in the Bay State turned into a 12-day trip to deal with a sibling in crisis. I got back to Naptown and spent four days packing up a carload of crap — surfboards, kiteboarding gear, kitchen stuff, books, clothes, clothes, more clothes, etc. — and heading back north to Mass, where I would remain for the rest of August and all of September.

But while I was there I attended a summer hockey party. One of the guys who skated in our weekly Wednesday-night game hosted everyone (and family members) at his palatial riverfront home on a sunny summer afternoon. And everyone who was there asked me if I was going to be around for the coming season, to which I had to reply that no, I was headed back to New England. Everyone expressed regret at that news (especially after I explained the reason why) and said they’d miss having me in the games. And as I drove back to town late in the afternoon I thought to myself, “How can I walk away from a community like that?”

Those who know me know I’m not much of a joiner. Not quite a misanthrope, I simply enjoy solitude and uncrowded spaces, and have always been a fan of taking the road less traveled. And yet I’ve also always been a team-sports player, and not just for the game itself. We always hear from recently retired pro athletes how what they really miss is the camaraderie, that team feeling and the locker room banter, and that’s also true for low-level hacks like myself. That community feeling that comes from being among one’s tribe is a primal force in the human psyche, and I have to confess that this feeling afflicts me with fierce power.

And yet drive back to Massachusetts I did. But recently I drove back down to Annapolis last week for ten days of working on the boat (to prep it for a winter out of the water) and working for the yacht brokerage to help them with the big powerboat and sailboat shows Annapolis hosts annually. And while there, that sense of community came back in waves.

For starters, before heading down I emailed a couple of the organizers of the various Annapolis hockey games I’d played in and asked if there was any space for me. They all replied enthusiastically that there was and that everyone would be glad to have me join in. As a result, I took my gear with me and played four games in those ten days and had a ball. And at every turn the guys asked how I was doing, how my brother was doing, if I was back for good and so on. The warmth I felt in a cold hockey rink was overpowering, and I choked up on several occasions while driving away from the rink.

That feeling of community came through in several other scenes, as well. The team at the yacht brokerage was universally glad I was there, supportive of what I was dealing with at home, and encouraged me to stay involved with the firm no matter where I was located.

And the group of friends that I originally met through my former slipmate was effusive in their happiness at my return and their wish that I’d come back permanently. Our weekly Saturday morning breakfast was filled not only with usual joy and ribbing, but also with heartfelt expressions of concern and friendliness. I got to enjoy two such gatherings while in Annapolis and on both occasions the walk back to my boat included gut-wrenching contemplation about my life, where I’m at and where I’m going. That, and a big smile at the warm feeling I got from being with good friends.

Ironically enough, on the drive home yesterday I listened to a podcast that featured Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general, on “loneliness and its impact on the mind, body and soul.” Dr. Murthy’s points about the importance and value of social connections were all perfectly illustrated by the events of the previous ten days.

Again, I’m not a joiner. Many of those Annapolis friends are members of one or another of the local yacht clubs and yet I never had interest in becoming a member. I have hockey games I play in here in New England, but the friendships seem confined to the rink — maybe because there’s so much more hockey up here compared to Maryland and it’s not such a niche group?

I returned home yesterday and was pleased in my soul to again be beside the ocean, to be back in the place where my spirit is at peace. I like Annapolis and the Chesapeake a lot, but there are also things I don’t like: the pollution in the bay, the distance to the sea, the bullshit politics of the marine industry. But the contentment that comes from being among a tribe that one has been adopted by — at the rink, at breakfast, at work, at the local pub — is a powerful draw. I don’t know that I’ll ever settle down in Annapolis; I know now I won’t rule it out.

More importantly, the experiences of the past ten days make me wonder if I need to cultivate even more social interaction, especially up here in Massachusetts where I don’t have core groups like I found in Annapolis. Because friendships and social interaction are so uplifting and empowering that the impacts carry throughout a life. Indeed, as Dr. Murthy pointed out, such interaction IS life. Or at least, a life well lived.

An Autumnal Update

I pumped up Further‘s dinghy this morning, one of several chores my faithful steed required after having been neglected for the better part of two months (the other big chore: washing all the bird shit off the deck). The tubes once again all taut with air pressure, I took the dinghy for a spin on Back Creek to go visit a couple of friends. I should have known such a trip would set me off but I went anyway. Oh well.

Why did it set me off? Because of patterns staring me in the face. It’s boat-show time here in Annapolis so that means Back Creek and Spa Creek and damn near every other creek and Annapolis Harbor and all the marinas in the area are chock full of boats in town for the show. And a good percentage of them are tackling last-minute chores before they head south for the winter once this weekend’s show concludes.

Which is right where I was at this time last year. And as we all know, I did not go south. And I won’t be going south this year, either. In fact, I’ll be going north. Just in time for winter.

What? You don’t know what’s going on? Well, I guess it has been quite some time since I’ve posted anything here, so let’s bring this chronicle up to date, shall we?

I’ve been living at home up on Plum Island since late July. I went up there to get my car its annual inspection and wound up having to stay to take care of some family drama. I returned to Annapolis for four days in mid-August to pack up pretty much all my junk and settled in at home while my brother took care of his medical issues. I’m happy to say he’s at home again and doing well — one day at a time, as they say — but in the interest of his long-term health, he’ll be heading out west at the end of this month.

Which means I will be living at Plum Island and caring for the house for the foreseeable future. In the coming months, I will try to get some of the pressing matters that still face our house addressed, chief among them the dormer that leaks into the living room during big nor’easters and the bathroom pipe that freezes during cold snaps. In addition to those two big-ticket items, there are innumerable little things that need addressing since my parents did little to no maintenance over the 20 years they lived in the house. Once the major issues are addressed, my brother and I will decide what happens next to our family home on Plum Island.

In order to make all this happen, I will have Further hauled out of the water and stored “on the hard” at a marina here in the Annapolis area. Come springtime, I’ll relaunch her and take her north to New England for the summer of 2020. And hopefully, I’ll be able to have a few projects done on Further over the winter months to improve her for next year’s cruising.

At least, that’s the plan.

Income being required in order to, you know, eat as well as do said projects on house and boat, if anyone has any job leads in northern Massachusetts, I would be most appreciative.

In the meantime, it’s been mostly nice being back on Plum Island. We’ve had surf and the water’s been wonderfully warm. But word has gotten out and now when we get a swell it’s like being in Southern California again: 30 freakin’ guys in the water all hassling for waves. Needless to say, given my snobbish attitudes about Plum Island waves, this does not sit well with me. But there’s not a lot I can do. And I figure most of the clowns will disappear when the water gets cold.

And it’s also been nice being back in Annapolis for the past week. I came down to do some digital work for my part-time employers and also to help them with the boat shows currently going on here in Naptown. I also, obviously, came down to check up on Further. I hope to take her out for a couple of hours in the next day or two, but we’ll see. I got in a skate Friday morning and will skate again Tuesday morning and Wednesday night, and it’s been good falling in with the old crew again.

I’ll head north on Sunday or Monday, the 13th or 14th, and then, on Wednesday the 16th, I’m flying to Mallorca — my first time ever in Spain — for the 50th birthday party of Marlies, of Boogie-and-Marlies fame. It’s been a year and a half since I’ve been out of the U.S. so it’s definitely time. And it will be great to see my old sailing friends on such an auspicious occasion.

I get back on the 23rd and take my brother to a couple of medical procedures on the 24th, after which I’ll head back down here to Maryland to haul out Further and winterize her. Which will be a somber occasion but a necessary one. If she’s on the hard I won’t have to worry about her over the winter. And I obviously won’t be here to take care of her so…

Again: at least, that’s the plan. Stay tuned to see how it all turns out.

The Hits Keep on Comin’

I wrote in a recent post over on my boat-focused site about my current situation in terms of work, life, the boat and, um, yeah, life. And as I wrote over there, I had a drive up to Massachusetts planned. The trip was going to be a quick one, a couple of days, to tackle some errands, most notably getting my car inspected and legal for another year. I did that drive this past Sunday and well, I’m still at Plum Island.

The day before I drove up I was at work showing some boats. And I was in a good mood, having finally closed the deal for the Tartan a day before. While showing the boats I got a voice-mail message from my brother asking me to call him. In between clients, I called him back and got his voice mail. I left a message saying I had planned to drive up that day but since work had gone so long I was going to stay in Annapolis and drive up on Sunday.

While sitting aboard Further around 9 a.m., my phone rang. It was my brother. I didn’t answer the phone because by that hour my brother had likely been drinking for a good 10 hours or more and I didn’t want to have another incoherent conversation, so I let it go to voice mail. He left no message.

The next morning I had packed and showered and was dressing when the phone rang again. My brother again. So I answered it. Pleasantries were exchanged and when I said I would be on the road in a few minutes he said, “I’m at Anna Jaques.” That’s the hospital in Newburyport. He told me he’d been feeling weak and short of breath, and that when he’d tried to mow the lawn he couldn’t do it. So he’d gone to the hospital and they’d kept him overnight and would be there another night. “All right,” I told him, “I’ll be there in eight hours or so.”

Traffic on a summer Sunday sucked so it took all of eight hours and then some. I went straight to the hospital upon reaching Newburyport and found him in his room. He’d been in a different room but had fallen trying to get out of bed so the nurses moved him to be closer to their station.

And he looked like shit. An unruly (even for him) mop of hair and a mangy Uncle Sam-style beard made him look like the Unabomber. Eyes sunk deep in a skull of yellowed skin. Bare legs splayed out below a filthy hospital gown. And when he talked he was unintelligible for long stretches.

He’d gone to one of those urgent-care places in a strip mall that are so prevalent in today’s fucked-up American health-care scene and they had told him he had to go to the ER. And now he’d spent 24-plus hours in the hospital.

I sugarcoated a lot of what I wrote in my post from a couple of weeks ago but one of the big question marks in my life has been the disposition of the house at Plum Island. And a big reason that’s a question mark is that my brother has been there for two years now. And that’s his right: he and I co-own the house. But I can’t live in that house with my brother because it’s too toxic. It’s too much like living with my father — which I did for several years while taking care of him — and I won’t do that again. And it’s too toxic being there with my brother for the same reason it was too toxic with my father: alcohol. And alcohol is why my brother is in the hospital.

My brother is a carpenter, and a good one, and he moved east in 2017 with all of his tools to take charge of all the fix-its and maintenance items our parents never got around to. That first fall I helped him as he rebuilt the decks. No mean feat, that: there’s a LOT of deck on the house. Since that project, nothing has been done. And in fact, my brother was living much the same life as my father: get up in the morning, read the paper at the breakfast table all morning, start drinking around 11 or 12, watch TV all day, fall asleep in front of the TV in the evening then wander upstairs to bed late. Then repeat the next day. The only difference was that my father was in his late 80s and early 90s and had suffered a broken hip.

And that was not an environment I wanted to be around again. So I retreated to Further in Annapolis. And that broke my heart because as I’ve written countless times, Plum Island is home. Even as I detest some of the changes the place is undergoing, it’s where my heart feels such joy. But I simply couldn’t be there with my brother there.

Except now I am. Well, he’s still in the hospital. When he described the symptoms on the phone I thought he might have had a heart attack. When I asked his nurse what was up she ran through a litany of “this test showed this and that test showed that,” and when I asked, “So, he didn’t have a heart attack or anything like that?” she replied, “It’s alcohol.”

So yeah, my brother has been in the hospital for six days detoxing.

I notified his daughters Sunday night after I left the hospital and his younger girl, who is a nurse, has taken charge of things. I visit him every day and up until yesterday was keeping the conversation focused on, “Hey, just get better, get stronger.” And over the six days he has gotten better: his blood labs are all much improved, he still has the shakes but they’re waning a bit, his eye sockets aren’t as yellow anymore, and he has begun walking again.

Yesterday I began mentioning that he needs to get help. The doctor told him flat out on the first day that if he didn’t stop drinking he would die, and he has told his daughter that he was properly scared by that statement. I hope that’s so but a couple of times he’s dropped the idea that we could put sheets on the couch in the living room and he could sleep there since the stairs in this house would be a challenge for him in his current condition. I’ve spoken with two friends who have been in AA for many years and they’ve been super helpful, offering resources to help him while also counseling me on how to deal with an alcoholic and what my brother is going through.

Next up for my brother should be physical therapy rehab, but his case worker revealed that because he has such shitty health insurance (thank god he has any) no rehab facility will admit him. Again, gotta love the American health care system. She’s still working on that, but there’s a strong chance that he’ll end up back here in the house in the next day or so. And I’m sorry, but I don’t believe my brother should come back to the house. Not yet anyway. I’ve already poured out all the booze that was here, but his daughters and I are in agreement that this place is kind of a black hole for him: for two years he’s been shut up inside with nothing going on. To come back to the scene of the crime, so to speak, is not going to be the temptation he needs. And how’s he going to get strong enough to be able to go to alcohol rehab — assuming he’s willing to go — living here on his own?

So then, selfishly, there’s my situation and my relation to these things that are going on. I had written my brother a letter a month-plus ago saying that when I came north for those errands we needed to talk about possibly selling the house. I have never wanted to sell it but as mentioned, I can’t live here with him. I won’t. But now I’m here and have begun some of the things the house needed: I paid a friend who used to clean the house for my parents to come in and do a heavy cleaning for a couple of days; I mowed the lawn that was knee-high; I cleaned the kitchen implements that had become just nasty; I’ve begun going through my parents’ stuff that I had set aside for my brother (and sister) to go through.

But more importantly, do I just leave if and when he comes home? I can’t just let him come back here and fall into old patterns and very likely kill himself. And the house was deteriorating rather than being renovated so letting it go further would be a major financial hit to him as well as me. But as mentioned, I closed that yacht deal so the boat brokering is starting to take off, and I also continue interviews as I look to resume my career. Do I focus my search on this area and settle in back here? Get the house back in order and live in my happy place at the same time while working hereabouts? Or do I just cut bait — on my brother, this house, Plum Island — and take a new direction in life, maybe even load up Further and sail away? I have no idea, and some of the major elements in the decision are out of my hands. And sorry, but I hate that feeling.

And sorry for another major-league vent in this space. But it helps me process information so thanks for indulging me.

Boy oh boy…another tumultuous stretch in the ol’ Smith Family Chronicles. Like sands through the hour glass…