The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner

No Nobel Prize for Literature? Thank Goodness.

Max Hardberger

Originally published on February 15, 2013

There was one evening, almost twenty years ago now, when the sun in the Leeward Islands had just set with a memorable green flash on the horizon, when the rigging on the sailboat we had chartered was making the familiar sound of ratcheting and releasing cordage, as the splash of the flying fish could be heard over the gunwales, and when the clear sky revealed more stars than one would think even God's imagination could hold, that I thought that the last thing that I ever wanted to do was to return to a Massachusetts winter and the scabrous demands of the underemployed faculty of the private school at which I was working in those days.  Whatever work I could find in the islands or along the Costa Maya, even as a marina deckhand or tour bus guide would have been fine with me.

Of course, I went back to the Berkshires and listened to the disgruntled and outraged, patiently smiled as the prosaic pretended to be the perspicacious, and saved my money so that I could again return to the Caribbean and that lonely boat in the middle of the Gulf Stream.

Max Hardberger was a high school teacher of history and English with a graduate degree in fine arts when he reached that point of no return that many in the more lyrical professions tend to reach when relating the subtleties of Shakespearean sonnet form to a roomful of ungracious adolescents.  He quit that nonsense and started his own very small air transport company.  Mainly, he transported the remains of the dead from one location to another, sometimes circumventing local laws by dressing the corpse as his co-pilot.  You can see why I like this guy; this is what "questioning authority" is really all about.

He then drifted into work on freighters, eventually getting his master's license and serving as a well-respected captain.  Then, one fateful day in Haiti, he found what was to become his life's work.  As anyone who has spent even a short amount of time in some of the ports of the Caribbean can testify, it is a remarkably corrupt area.  In the 1980's, small local governments were notorious for using their courts systems to "legally" seize any ship or boat that caught their fancy.  One day, Hardberger found himself on the pointy end of some rifles [Or are they now "assault weapons"?  I'll have to ask a politician, TV reporter, or movie star; they know everything.] while in Port-Au-Prince when his ship was seized by some local "businessmen".  Naturally, he surrendered the ship.  Sort of.

While a handful of guards were left on board, Max threw them a party with lots and lots of rum.  Once the guards were unconscious, unarmed, and locked in a cabin, Hardberger quickly moved his ship into international waters and placed the former guards in an open boat to row themselves back to the Haitian mainland.  When the story became known, Hardberger became a legend in the commercial shipping community.

So much so that, from that point on, he was asked to, essentially, "steal" back ships that had been seized by corrupt governments or their local bureaucrats.  It became a surprisingly lucrative enterprise.  Although I'm speaking as one who was never more than on the outside of the very remote orbit of Caribbean sailors, I can testify that Hardberger is regarded as a combination of Robin Hood and Captain Morgan, maybe with a little bit of Superman thrown in for good measure.

I could relate some more of his adventures, but I don't think I could do so with the same linguistic panache as the writer whom I quote below.  A word of warning, though; if you choose to go to the link, you will find the paragraphs laced with pungent language:

Hardberger once repoed a freighter from the Russian Mafiya [sic] in the ice-covered Baltic port of Vladivostok, Russia. One time he captured a ship in Central America by hiring a prostitute to flirt with the guards and give them shots of booze lined with Hardberger's-homemade handy-dandy insta-sedatives. During the Haitian Revolution of 2004, Hardberger sailed into the battle-torn hive of destruction in the middle of a warzone, boarded a ship pretending to be a potential buyer, and got his men to distract the guards while he snuck off, repaired a damaged engine, and cut the anchor chains with a blowtorch. Another time in Haiti, he used a Voodoo witch doctor to freak out a crew of AK-47 slinging pirates and send them running from the ship. In Venezuela he straight-up convinced the guards that the...ship was sinking, and he did such a good job of it that the entire crew of bad guys all ran to the life boats and rowed back to shore, leaving Max and his buddies plenty of time to leisurely pull the ship out of dock. He also snuck a boat out of Greece by buying the Coast Guard a case of Ouzo on Greek Easter and sailing out right under their noses. More recently, he's hired a team of ex-Special Forces operatives to help him extract ships from Somali pirates armed with assault rifles and RPGs, but by this point it was about as routine as filing a TPS report.

During his adventures, Hardberger has been chased by pirates, shot at by Mafia bosses, accosted by Coast Guard officials, and pursued by god-knows-who-else. He once eluded...INTERPOL agents by grinding the ship's name and serial number of its hull mid-transit and painting a fake new name over top of it. In the Dominican Republic he was being pursued by a...naval cruiser, but even a...warship couldn't slow this moustachioed madman down – during his recon, Hardberger had noticed that the Dominican navy was using outdated radar gear, so he sailed his ship right into the middle of a horrible thunderstorm because he knew it would [mess]with their detection equipment.

Hardberger has written a book or two about his adventures; I can certainly recommend Seized: A Sea Captain's Adventures Battling Scoundrels and Pirates While Recovering Stolen Ships in the World's Most Troubled Waters, as it is a ripping yarn and great fun.  The chapter on how he "stole" 47 airplanes across Soviet airspace and got them to Venezuela is alone worth reading.

Hardberger is still recovering illicitly seized ships and still collecting remarkable fees for so doing.  Just as importantly, he still serves as the subject of some wonderful tales that can be heard in port and marina bars from Key West to Puerto Aventuras.

This is an Absolutely Terrible Headline

NASA has plans to probe Uranus in search of gas

Is everyone at this site 12-years-old?  I'm not giggling; you're giggling.

I'm Told Religion is Gone, Yet There is Nothing to Replace It Except...This

Blame Modern Life for Political Strife

It’s hard to argue against the comforts of modernity. Avocado toast, fiber optics, Roombas. What’s not to love? Technological innovation and trade liberalization have yielded prosperity and stability. Poverty, infant mortality, and global hunger have fallen. Human development, life expectancy, and food production have risen. Compared to our ancestors, we’re the glitterati.

But there are always tradeoffs. While urbanization and personal accumulation have enriched the West, they have also produced a culture of narcissism and illusion of time scarcity. This self-preoccupation and feeling of lost leisure time has reduced our participation in civic organizations. We’re engaging less with one another. And as a consequence, societal trust has dissipated. This has inhibited the development of common interests and shared identities, prompting a return to an archaic tribalism which prioritizes salient features over ideological values.

So, Pretty Much This is the Next Two Years, Then

Americans must have answers immediately as to the reasoning behind @realDonaldTrump removing Jeff Sessions from @TheJusticeDept. Why is the President making this change and who has authority over Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation? We will be holding people accountable. https://t.co/weykMuiCxm

— (((Rep. Nadler))) (@RepJerryNadler) November 7, 2018

This UGA Professor is a Genius

Now, that's Power Point.

Archaeological News

The Hidden Coastal Culture of the Ancient Maya

Good for Them

Generation Z Is Choosing Trade School over College

What, you don't want to bear $100,000 in student loan debt for a degree in "gender studies" that ensures that you'll be unemployable?

There is No Such Thing as Voter Fraud, Dang It!

The last time there was an election, I received a letter thanking my father for voting. Not only did he manage to vote while deceased, he voted twice.

I should explain that Dad had been the treasurer of the county Democratic Party, so I guess he had "lifetime plus" membership.

Sorry, but the West is Busy Fretting About a Two-Year-Old Election

Where are the West’s solidarity marches for Asia Bibi? Where are the t-shirts? Why aren’t ‘Free Asia Bibi’ flags flying on campuses? Why haven’t student progressives elected Asia as the symbolic head of their unions, as they did with persecuted Eastern European writers in the 1970s or African liberation leaders in the 1980s? 

Bibi, after all, comes across as an ideal person for those of a genuinely liberal or leftist persuasion to get behind. She’s a woman. She’s a farm labourer. She is part of a persecuted minority (Christians in Pakistan). And she has been subjected to awful punishments and deprivations merely for saying something.

If a "subject-predicate-Trump" sentence cannot be written about this, our thought leaders aren't interested.

As Heard on the Radio

Senator Mark Warner [$500 million personal net worth] states, “I don’t believe modern American capitalism is working…”

Well, it's working for you, sparky.  I sure seem to be getting a lot of lectures on what's best for me from millionaires, and it's never about how I should be able to keep more of what I earn.

I Will Vote for Any Candidate Who Will End This Nonsense

100 Years Later, The Madness Of Daylight Saving Time Endures

Worth Reading

What Happened to Our Universities?

As extensively documented, our universities have been swept up into a new cultural movement, the so-called “social justice” movement. “Social justice” ideology is based on the Marxist vision that the world is divided into oppressor classes and oppressed classes. Unlike classical Marxism that divides the world into a bourgeois oppressor class and a proletarian oppressed class — that is capitalists oppressing workers — neo-Marxist “social justice” theory divides the world into gender, racial, sexual, and religious classes: male oppressors and female victims; white oppressors and people of color victims; heterosexual oppressors and gay, lesbian, transsexual, etc. etc. victims; Christian and Jewish oppressors and Muslim victims.

More Pungency

Another episode of "Get Woke, Go Broke":

Ratings: “The Conners” Beaten By Everything, Drops in Total Viewers and Demo as ABC Orders Only 1 More Episode

I never watched this show, even in its original incarnation.  I say that not to shore up my intellectual bona fides, but to note that all of what I know of it I've either read in the media or heard about from co-workers, etc.

One of those people, who is not sympathetic towards the current occupant of the White House or those who support him, actually complimented the re-introduced show for speaking in a mature, yet humorous, manner about families trying to figure out how to love one another in the midst of political disagreement.  Since no one else in entertainment is doing that, I noted it.

Of course, the star of the show began her career as an "outrage comedian", and has fulfilled that definition for a number of decades now, so the network knew whom they were hiring and what she was like.  The new, neo-Marxist, neo-Victorian rules of comportment caught up with them, however, and they panicked and killed off a money-maker.

I don't care about any of the actors.  Sorry, but their compensation from just one episode is equal to 8 and 1/2 years of my salary, so they'll be okay.  I do care about all of those people on the crew, who had found themselves working on a hit TV show, suddenly to be left unemployed because the network needed to appeal not to the viewing public, but to their own incestuous political world. 

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner [Read These and You Will Know More]

William Hazlitt Was the Consummate Critic: Observant, Difficult, and Fascinating

Meanwhile, Outside of the Media Obsession with a Two-Year-Old Election...

Gunmen killed at least seven Coptic Christians in Egypt as they were traveling on a bus near a monastery — the most serious assault on the religious minority in over a year.

John Fitch

Originally published on February 1, 2013

“You know what makes a racer different from other people?  

The faster he goes, the more relaxed he becomes.”

I found myself thinking about John Fitch's words on the afternoon that he took me about the countryside, regaling me with stories of great drivers, great moments, and terrible tragedies while I blithely tried to ignore the fact that a man of nearly ninety was about to exceed that number on his car's speedometer and, all the while, looking like other men do when they sit in a recliner and watch football. I shouldn't have been worried; I doubt if I have ever been in safer hands.  The reason that I found myself riding in an open roof, hyper-powered vehicle on the winding road that is Route 7 and shooting through the West Cornwall covered bridge was because of one of those odd duties that has marked my career.

Not a bad weekend ride, eh?

Because my parish was next door to the well-known Lime Rock Park race track, and I belonged to the local volunteer fire department, I had been asked to serve as the "chaplain" to the track and its drivers.  My duty was remarkably simple:  I gave the invocation at the beginning of the race, standing at the start/finish line with the singer of the National Anthem, the honored guest who says, "Gentlemen and Ladies, start your engines", and some scantily clad Pirelli Tire girls.  I've had worse duty, believe me.

That reminds me; I need new tires.

Each year I would be "paid" with two season passes, which was a magnanimous compensation, a gift of either a book about racing, a facsimile of Steve McQueen's racing jacket from the film "Le Mans", or, one spectacular year, the chance to ride with John Fitch in a racing car of his own construction.  Yeah, that year was the best.  I only wish I had worn the McQueen jacket while doing so.

I suppose it looked better on him, but still....

John Fitch, his wife, children, and great-grandchildren, were Episcopalians and familiar to the Anglican community in the northwest corner of the state.  However, I was familiar with him because, as a fan of auto-racing, I knew a story about him, a famous one in auto racing that included the false reporting of death, an international tragedy, the half-century withdrawal from racing by one of the world's premier automobile marques, and the impetus for the creation of safety devices that would eventually become standard equipment on highways.

It should be no surprise that Fitch was born in Indianapolis, as that is the ideal spot from which to hail for an American racer.  Not just due to the famous track and its race, but because of the tradition of machines, metal fabrication, engineering, and manufacturing for which the Hoosier city is also known.  In this world, it was natural for Fitch to develop an interest in all of these things.  As his stepfather was an exec with the Stutz Company, makers of the famous Bearcat, Fitch was able to abide with those who showed him how to take junk metal and turn it into a functional car.  This, even before he was licensed to drive, became his hobby and passion.

Fitch enjoying another day at the office.

After serving as a Mustang pilot during WWII, his avocation became his profession.  Beginning in 1950, Fitch raced a Ford-powered Fiat 1100, which he soon modified into the "Fitch Model B", and drove in the first 12 Hours of Sebring. In 1951, he won the Buenos Aires Grand Prix, drove in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and became the first Sports Car Club of America national champion.  In 1953, Fitch competed in as many European races as he could afford to enter and was named "Sports Car Driver of the Year" by the automotive press.  The next season, he drove for both Ferrari and Mercedes-Benz and, in 1955, Fitch raced for the Mercedes-Benz sports car team along with Juan Manuel Fangio, Karl Kling, and Stirling Moss [the three best drivers of this era]. That year, Fitch won the production class at the Mille Miglia.

Then came the most notorious moment in road racing history, occurring as it did during that year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, to this day the world’s most demanding endurance race.  As the drivers race for 24 consecutive hours, they are made up of two or three-man teams, each alternating a couple of hours at the wheel with a couple of hours of rest.  That year Fitch’s teammate was Pierre Levegh, not one of the great drivers of his era, and a fellow who should have had nothing to do with a professional automobile competition of this calibre.

From an official retrospective:

Hours after flame and flying metal erupted, few of the spectators at Le Mans, France knew what had happened. It was days before drivers' stories and these pictures could reconstruct the worst accident in racing history. Some 250,000 spectators had gathered for Europe's classic sports car race, the 24-hour test around an 8.38-mile course. Concerned about a course laid out years ago for slower cars, Mercedes Driver Pierre Levegh complained, "We need a signal system. Our cars go too fast."

As the race entered its third hour the cars were breaking records at every lap when Jaguar Driver Mike Hawthorn received a signal from his pit crew to stop for gas. As he braked, an Austin-Healey swerved to avoid him. A few lengths behind, Levegh raised his hand, signaling another Mercedes to slow up. At 150 mph he had no chance to do so himself.

Hitting the Healey, the Mercedes took off like a rocket, struck the embankment beside the track, hurtled end over end and then disintegrated over the crowd. The hood decapitated tightly jammed spectators like a guillotine. The engine and front axle cut a swath like an artillery barrage. And the car's magnesium body burst into flames like a torch, burning others to death. In a few searing seconds 82 people were dead and 76 were maimed. Hawthorn, though unnerved, went on to win and set a new record.

Fitch's family heard on the radio that it was Fitch, and not his co-driver Levegh, who had been driving the Mercedes and been killed in the conflagration.  It took some time to straighten out the misinformation.  Mercedes-Benz would immediately withdraw its factory teams from all forms of competitive racing for half a century.

Fitch's close involvement with this tragedy lead him to grow beyond driving and car development and into the area of safety equipment.  While he was one of the first racers to build his own eponymous cars, he is best known these days as the inventor of "The Fitch Barrier", those sand-filled barrels often seen on highway off-ramps and bridge abutments.  Innumerable times they have rendered potentially horrific traffic accidents into one-car incidents with little or no damage to driver and passengers.

John Fitch died last October.  The Burial Office was read for him in the local parish.  He will be remembered for two things: His association with the deadliest accident in racing history and his determination that nothing like that would ever happen again, be it on a track or a highway.  Mostly, I remember him for that Sunday drive. 

Although, to be honest, once it was over I was tempted to kiss the ground like the Pope when I was released from that car.  I guess that's why I'm not a racer.

A Pungent Reaction

I think the last thing anyone needs is Oprah Winfrey ($3 billion personal net worth) lecturing us about income inequality.

Ditto B. Obama ($50 million personal net worth).

While I'm at it, Michael Moore (also $50 million personal net worth with NINE houses in his name) can sit down, as well.

Publishing Gets Clever

Tiny Books Fit in One Hand. Will They Change the Way We Read?

I Don't Have a Big Problem with This

Scientist in a Remote Outpost in Antarctica Stabbed Man Who Kept On Telling Him the Ending of Books