Wilbur Hubbard wrote:


I think you're horrified because you think my daughter is young - like
maybe a teenager or younger. It would be weird for a young person like
that to take death so casually. Young people take death of a parent
VERY personally and they do so because they still sorta think they are
the center of the universe. And, that's normal at their age. Nope, I'm
an old fart. My daughter is all grown up and haired over. She's got kids
of her own. She knows people get old and die. She knows I'm doing what I
want to be doing. She knows I have no regrets and she knows she has no
regrets. She lives in the real world and I think that's wonderful.

My daughter is young. She was 11 when I set out to sea alone single
handing. I think her anxiety was reasonable then as it is now although
she's a bit older. While I didn't have a sat phone then and I may or may
not have one if I go again, I don't think having one to call her from
time to time to reassure her that all's ok is unreasonable or a signal
that I'm a girlie man.

If your daughter is older and all right with her / your / all death,
fine. That's her. I don't know what it means for a daughter to be
'haired over'.

Any anger you sense on my behalf is a result of the wimpification of men
that's happened in the last sixty or seventy years. I've seen men go
from being men to entire generations of men turning into girly men,
objects of derision, objects of ridicule, the butt of jokes, portraits
of ineptitude, weak, indecisive, telephone to the ear like a security
blanket types. More like women than men. What's next? Hormone injections
to their breasts so they can share nursing the kids? The "men" whose
posts I read here are so far from the men of my youth that's it's
appalling. I'm ashamed of them. Fat, soft, weak, fawning, sensitive,
unassuming, indecisive, ignorant, in need of constant companionship,
dependent, concerned - more female than male.

No, the anger you see me express is anger combined with sorrow and
disgust for the wimpification of men. Not to mention the disgust I feel
for wimpified men who don't seem to realize they shouldn't be living
that way.

So we think and I've thought the same myself. The question is if we're
really softer or if we aren't called to be harder. When I and my late
wife lived in WY, we wondered at the Original Settlers who lived in
soddies and were wintered in for months. These families were self
sufficient or dead.

I lived for months in the NWT of Canada in a tent - again pretty much
sufficient but with my camp mates - about 5 of us total. We managed to
do our work, cook our food, fish or hunt or whatever it took. When I
returned to Calgary, I returned to my normal life or the soft life perhaps.

Aside from duration, there wasn't much difference between me and Slocum
single handing aside from me having a much larger craft. No, that
doesn't make me the equal of Slocum, only that I too can live w/o
refrigeration and stand long watches in storms too. So are we really the
same as the ancestors or would the ancestors use refrigeration and sat
phones if only they had them? That is, have we changed or, as I think do
we just have more options?

Slocum did spherical trig on paper with a pencil. Would he have been
less admirable had he a 10 key?

-paul