(Re)Launch

Those of you ancient enough to remember the demise of Life Magazine in 1973 may also remember when it was resuscitated as a monthly. The October 1978 premiere issue hit the newsstands that September, which also happens to be the same month I moved to New York City to go to college (don’t ask.) The new Life featured an article about the soon-to-be-released movie version of “The Wiz” which was, at the time, the most expensive musical ever produced at a staggering… uh, thirty-five million dollars.

Why am I bringing this up? Because the cover of the magazine’s re-launch issue pictured hot air balloons and that is the very subject of the re-launch of tomjudson.blogspot.com.

I was invited to go on a balloon flight yesterday evening by Michael, a Greene County neighbor who is also a balloon pilot. I had never been aloft by balloon before so I jumped at the chance. 36 hours after bidding adieu to the sparkling blue waters of the Caribbean I was viewing—from above—the lush green canopy of upstate New York. Which was more beautiful? Neither. They are both, in their own way, magnificent.

As I approached the meeting point I scanned the horizon for the balloon (or “envelope,” as I now know it’s called) and saw… nothing. I pulled into the parking lot and there was Michael and his trailer. Oh, I get it; this is going to be a real hands-on balloon experience. Yup, I assisted in unloading and setting up the balloon and basket before we took off.

The stored envelope is the size of an overstuffed club chair and is unrolled to its full length and laid on the ground. Then the supports are attached to the basket (which is real wicker, by the way. I was expecting some new-fangled fiberglass gondola, but Phineas Fogg himself would be comfortable in this rig) and the envelope cables are connected to the supports.

After that, it’s pretty much what you’d expect: a fan blows air into the envelope and the thing inflates. When the burners are fired, the interior of the balloon heats up and it slowly rises to the vertical. Michael climbed in first, then his friend Chris, and after she was secure, I fell over the side into the basket. Michael gave the burner a few more blasts and we rose into the sky like… well, like a balloon.

(The theory behind flying a balloon is remarkably similar to scuba diving. Buoyancy is dictated by the pressure/temperature inside the BCD (and lungs)/envelope in relation to the water/air outside. You increase the buoyancy of the BCD/envelope with short bursts of air/fire. To maneuver, one must anticipate these adjustments. Again and again Michael would explain what he was doing and it all made sense to me from my recent underwater education.)

The evening was crystal clear and we could see for miles. All the way north to Albany and all the way west to the The Berkshires. We were amazed how much unspoiled forest there is in our area. We floated gently and slowly east and gained altitude as we went. I took a turn at the burners and the next thing I knew we had ascended to almost 3,000 feet. It was magnificent. When the burners are not actually firing it’s completely silent; we could hear conversations in backyards as we passed overhead, our shadow leading the way.

I phoned my friends the Boulers to alert them we were heading straight for their house, but the wind changed direction just before we reached the reservoir and the balloon turned south. There’s a Buddhist monastery in Greene County and we flew directly over the pagoda at their forest retreat instead.

Since it was a quiet Sunday evening cars stopped right on the road to watch as we glided by. People would yell up to us and wave their arms. A private jet appeared to veer off course to get a slightly closer look at its aviational ancestor.

We saw no birds to speak of. Maybe we were too high?

When Michael decided we should start looking for a place to land (2 1/2 hours into the flight!) we happened to be just a few miles from my house. We came in lower and lower and found a hay field that looked good. Cars were lining the road as Michael navigated the air currents and headed for a clear spot so we would land just before sunset. When the balloon was mere yards from the ground two kids came running through the woods and into the open field, screaming gleefully at the beautiful rainbow balloon descending from the early-evening sky. Michael’s landing was flawless; if I had been holding a cocktail (and why wasn’t I holding a cocktail?) the ice would not have tinkled in the glass.

The folks came out of their farmhouse, the neighbors traipsed across the lawn and with their help we had the entire operation packed up in jig time. The evening was magical.

Now, can we please once and for all stop pitying “poor Tom” for returning from Saba sooner than expected? Tha-a-a-a-ank you!

Your own special dreams bloom on the hillside.

By the time the plane reached St. Maarten ten minutes later, Saba was little more than a silhouette in the mist; a shadow of an illusion; there, across that short stretch of the Caribbean. My summer, however, is etched on my brain with a permanence and vividness few other experiences of my life can claim. I will synthesize my time there in the days and weeks and months ahead into something concrete and descriptive.

But right now my feelings about my two months can’t be conveyed in prose. What I need now is a tune, a wordless melody that climbs and soars as high as the highest peak on the island and which, like the elusive view at the summit of Mt. Scenery--at that highest point on Saba--simply… fades away.

[A note to readers: Rattling the Saba, as a title has indeed come to a close. But the actual URL is so delicious, so perfectly me that I see no reason to abandon it. The Canned Ham blog will resume as the journal of my ongoing project, but tomjudson.blogspot.com will remain and be transformed into something a little more general, if not actually esoteric. Stay tuned.]

Joint Custody II

[This is the second entry to be posted simultaneously on both blogs.]

 

 

 

I killed ‘em on Booby Hill.

 

Since I wrote the first two drafts of “Canned Ham” here at El Momo, and since it was Patrick and Sophie’s invitation to come down here for the summer that inspired the writing of it in the first place, there was a nice poetic symmetry in giving the first public reading of the script this past Tuesday evening, here at El Momo.

 

We invited about a dozen of the friends I’ve made since my arrival on the island two months ago to a reading to be held in the dining pavilion.  Once people caught their breaths after climbing the stairs (6 storeys up from the road, remember?) I plied them with alcohol.  As all performers know, a slightly tipsy audience is a friendly audience.  No fool, I.  Patrick had casually mentioned a couple of days earlier that he’d “make some tapas” for the event.  Frankly, he lost control; he put out a spread that a) was beyond belief in its variety and tastiness (bacon-wrapped shrimp, sautéed celery, fish tempura cheese, crackers, pumpkin soup… I can’t even remember everything on the table) and b) made for a hard act to follow.  Suddenly I was appearing at the El Momo Dinner Theater.

 

When everyone was pleasantly stuffed with food and drink I said a few words to introduce the piece and then got underway.  Let’s just say I was pleased with the response.  I learned a lot about the text from both an actor’s perspective and from the point of view of the author.  Some things need to go, others can be fleshed out.  Some jokes didn’t work, some worked even better than I’d hoped.  Still other lines will remain but will be refashioned.  Frankly, it was an invaluable exercise, particularly in light of the fact that the references in the play are particularly American, and (thank God) I found that the script seems to work regardless of one's pop-culture frame of reference.

 

Flipping back through earlier blog entries I see that on April 3^rd of this year the idea of writing a show here on Saba and returning to the states to tour it around the country in the camper really solidified into the plan that is now in place.  Just three and half months later and a huge chunk of that plan—the script—is a reality.  There are some other details (fun stuff) that I’ll talk more about when I get back home and get things cookin’ on that end.  But for now, I can count my summer holiday on Saba a complete, total and utterly fabulous success.

And that's not even counting my world-class tan line. 

Gingerbread

Almost all the buildings on Saba are white with red roofs and, if there is an alternate color trim, it’s green.  There are a few anomalies to this color scheme, so I gather the red/white thing is not regulation (although no one I’ve asked seems to know for sure.)  It’s one of the things that adds charm to the island, this uniformity, especially when seen at a distance. Across a gulley will lie a cluster of what looks like a variation on Monopoly board houses.  The fact that nearly all the island’s structures are quite modest only adds to this effect.

 

The gingerbread trim on most of the houses is almost whimsical; some examples are elaborately filigreed borders while others appear to be simply the quickest and easiest thing the owner could slap on the front of the house.  I find the latter to be among the most appealing.

Here are a few examples.

Mountain Greenery

Here are some photos from today’s hike on Sandy Cruz trail.  It’s a good trail because it’s not particularly taxing (although a light rain made it very slick) and because it takes you along the north side of the island, which is basically uninhabited and therefore little seen.  But mostly it’s a good trail because it’s beautiful.  These pictures don’t begin to do it justice.  Mainly due to the lack of real depth in the images (the jungle is as deep as the eye can see) and because it’s impossible to convey a sense of scale.  Everything you see in these photos is much larger than you imagine it to be.  The red blossoms in the first shot are about three times the size of my hand. 

Pullin' a Palin

Yes, I’m leaving Saba before my expected departure date.

 

But no tears, no recriminations please.  “Just” two months in Paradise is not to be sneezed at.  You may recall the initial impetus for this adventure was the invitation by Patrick and Sophie to come help them out at El Momo on a few small projects they had around the place.  That would justify letting me spend the summer here as a freeloader, er, non-paying guest.  It was after that offer came that I dreamed up the whole scheme of writing a play while I was on the island which I would then take on the road when I returned home to the states.

 

Well, Patrick and Sophie are indeed terrific hosts and innkeepers.  So much so that they were headhunted away to another cottage complex here on Saba.  Five minutes away.  But one of the things they were not going to negotiate for in their new position was their friend, you know that guy who’s been hanging around town since May, the one who sings occasionally at Saboake on Fridays?  Yeah, that one.  Well, he’s coming along with us to stay in one of the cabins for free. 

 

Uh, no.  I don’t think so.

 

And since I didn’t particularly want to see if I could stay on here at El Momo when the owner—whom I’ve never met--returns form Holland, I thought, “cue exit music and… curtain.”

 

Which is a nice transition to a second, and more compelling reason for my premature am-scray:  my “Canned Ham” script is at the point where I don’t want to do any more work on it until I settle on a director and involve them in additional revisions.  And I’m very anxious to do that.  (The italics are mine.)  In my head, since completing the second draft, my late-August departure date has been slowly creeping forward the more I have been thinking about the show.  What can I say?  I’m happy about what I’ve gotten down on paper and I’m excited about getting the thing on its feet.  

 

(Speaking of which, I’ll be getting it on its knees next week when I give an informal reading of the script to a tiny group of my Saba friends.  Should be interesting.)

 

So, I’ll be on the 9:30 A.M. flight from Saba Airport next Friday, the 17^th and back home later that evening.  Since my stay here has been perfect… flawless… the nes plus ultra of étés, I could almost be considered prudent by quitting while I’m ahead.

 

Knowing all this was in the works, I sang a couple of extra songs last night at Sabaoke.  “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” went over well but it turns out “Twilight Time” starts on a stratospheric note that I did not quite hit.  No Platter, I.  Wanting to end big, I asked Wolfgang, who owns the place and runs Saboake, if I could join him in a duet on one of his signature tunes.  We rocked the house with “Mack the Knife.”

 

“Look out old Mackie is back!” 

 

    

Overboard

Again, the widescreen version is here:

The Sponges Are Spawning

It’s pretty difficult to translate the experience of being/breathing underwater into words.  That fleeting nanosecond of panic when your face drops below the surface and you take your first breath through the regulator before normalcy resumes; the illusion, when looking from below, that the surface slowly bends towards you and appears concave; the moment when “here” and “there” swap meaning as you drop from sea-level and approach the ocean floor.    How to describe swimming along the side of a sheer wall that drops beyond sight?  A wall covered with coral so intensely colorful and developed that it almost seems as if it had been art-directed?  As if it were someone’s fantasy of coral and not something that could really exist in nature?  Can language convey the sensation of seeing a huge school of fish—just like in your aquarium when you were a kid, but ten times the size—swim directly towards you and then around you as if you were meaningless in their world?  Or a stingray the dimensions of a good-sized area rug passing just below as you maneuver through a cleft in the rock?  How can I describe the childlike joy I feel when I allow myself to hover completely upside-down, feet pointing towards the surface, just because it’s fun?

 

I can’t.  I’ve come to the conclusion that these things need to be experienced first-hand.

 

What I can do is post some photos I took underwater.  Even these give only an approximation of what I saw with my eye.  Color underwater is problematical.  So is getting a fish to stand still for a shot.  For that matter, getting oneself to stand still is not much easier:  by the time you’ve decided, “this is my shot!” you’ve already floated past the perfect framing.

 

On one trip with Ellie, my dream instructor, I noticed some tubular sponges surrounded by cloudy water.  I pointed at them and shrugged, “what is that?”  Ellie took out her slate and wrote, “The sponges are spawning their eggs and their sperm.”  I took the pencil from her (a plain old no. 2 pencil, amazingly enough) and added:  POETRY!

 

Poetry, indeed.