Renaissance

Confession: Secretly, I want to be a Rennie. Or maybe, more accurately, I want to have been a Rennie.

A "Rennie" is someone who participates in Renaissance festivals, also known colloquially as "faires" or "shows." There are scores around the country -- two big ones of longstanding in Texas -- and they are, in aggregate, an absolutely fascinating subculture.

I'm not certain I have the chronology right, but I think it goes something like this: in the 1970s, a California educator put on a weekend-long "market" festival with an emphasis on artisanship. It was sort of an outgrowth of back-to-basics hippie self-sufficiency, a reaction to the plasticization (in the sense that Ruben Blades uses the word "plastic" in his song of the same name) of late-20th-century American culture.

Over time, Ren faires grew to offer period costumes and performances, vendors offering an amazing array of arts and crafts and demonstrations of everything from soap-making to blacksmithing to glass-blowing.

At a Renaissance festival, visitors are likely to see everything from jousting demonstrations to pub wenches to mud beggars to virtuoso performances on the hammer(ed) dulcimer. It's modern-day vaudeville, with knife-throwing, puppetry, juggling and comedy routines that sometimes reach a level of sophistication and polish seen nowhere else. The Flaming Idiots got their start at Ren faires.

Historical accuracy apparently is not a strict requirement. There's a good deal of schlock, and more than a few anachronisms, mixed in with the art and period pieces.

Visitors will also see lots and lots of costumes; some are period (14th-17th c.) costumes, faithfully reproduced and worn. Others are complete flights of fancy, or -- more accurately -- fantasy. Like the gentleman in bright blue leather armor and Justin roper boots I saw opening weekend at Scarborough.

The phenomenon has given birth to its own jargon, as true subcultures must; my 8-year-old son is, for now, a "playtron." A patron who comes in costume. It's not a stretch for a boy who is, predictably, enamored of knights and castles, swords and wizardry. The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter movies weren't blockbusters for nothing.

I was vaguely aware of the Texas Renaissance Festival and Scarborough Faire. More than vaguely, truthfully; I had a secret yearning to go and see and participate.

Two developments recently have made this possible.

The first, of course, is Patrick's interest. Where else is he going to be able to spend a day in his knight costume and test his jousting skills on the quintane? Where else will he be addressed, dozens of times throughout the day, as "m'lord?"

At Scarborough last weekend he was recruited, on the street, by an enterprising Borgia who offered him 50 gold florins to kill Oliver Cromwell. It was a genius strategy, I thought: after all, who would suspect an innocently smiling, tow-headed 4-foot assassin? Even if he does go by "Sir Patrick the Sinister." (At the risk of giving away his advantage in swordplay, it's because he's left-handed.)

Patrick experienced a Renaissance festival -- TRF near Houston -- before I did. In the end, though, his interest could simply be another of those things parents tolerate to humor their kids.

My other entree into the Ren world is in some ways more significant.

Renaissance is a vital part of Tamara's enchanting story. For more than a decade, she "did the circuit," a series of shows that kept her on the road and engaged in an earthy, hippie art and performance culture six months out of the year.

Today she has a highly responsible and remunerative position with a successful Austin software company. She's come to treasure things like indoor plumbing, air conditioning and -- lately -- down comforters. She's happy to have health insurance and a 401(k).

In some respects Tamara is pretty typical of the other Rennies I've met: bright, well-read, highly creative ... most of these folks could make a go at just about anything they turned their hands to. The shows do for them what Austin does for musicians: allows them to make a living doing what they love best in a world that too often values "counters" over "makers."

It was a big leap for Tamara, to leave the Ren world and pursue a "straight" job. Her best friends -- people she has known and loved for two decades, in some cases -- are, many of them, still on the road. A few have opted for a more settled existence. The lucky ones, in my view, manage to keep one foot in each place.

Tam has done that by working hard to maintain those relationships, making herself useful in small ways on show weekends and being very, very careful not to violate the many unwritten rules of the tribe.

Some of those rules, I think, have to do with how much access is given to outsiders, how far they are allowed to penetrate that culture.

I am an outsider. I have a straight job, have only ever held straight jobs. I don't own a costume. I am not an artist, or even a particularly competent craftsman. My last dramatic effort was a run as Ensign Pulver in a UIL One-Act Play production of "Mister Roberts."

Bringing me along as she bridges the gap between her two worlds carries risks for her, not the least of which is loss of credibility and ostracization from her tribe. For me the risk is rejection, embarassment -- the kind a foreigner feels when mistaking an idiom or violating a taboo, being responsible for somehow separating her from a part of her life that is still very important to her.

As Tamara has revealed to me, bit by bit, more of her story and given me more insights into the Ren world, I've wondered at how honestly curious I am and how easily accepting I have been of the whole fantastic hippy-pagan-gypsy-crafting lifestyle.

But as I've traded story for story, and my memory was jogged by things she said, I've finally come to see it as No Big Surprise.

Some of my earliest best memories are of helping my grandma in her shop in Rockport. A retirement enterprise for my grandparents, it was something of a typical tourist trap -- full of sea shells and postcards and (this being before China's cheap-labor hegemony) imports from Mexico.

Alongside the rusty cutlasses and faux armor and serape-draped stuffed frogs, there was some genuine craft: lampshades created from thinly-sliced, translucent stone; paper weights and toilet seats and bric-a-brac preserving anything of interest -- shells, gems, fossils ... rattlesnake rattles? -- in heavy plastic resin.

Grandma made jewelry, and between her and my Grandpa there wasn't a rock or gem in sight that didn't receive at least a couple paragraphs of exposition. Grandpa was a water-witcher and a mushroom expert, could readily find and sort the tasty from the merely edible, the hallucinoginic from the lethal. A curious skill, now that I think of it, but one he shared with more than a few Rennies, if Ray St. Louis is to be believed.

Fantasy was so much a part of my life that I just assumed everyone had read Tolkien's trilogy three times by the time they were 15, and knew who Reepicheep and Aslan were.

My first great romance was with a beautiful, free-spirited woman who didn't particularly care for shaving under her arms but knew a whole lot about writing poetry, baking bread, milking cows and making cheese. I was blessed to have the opportunity to do all of that and more over long summer and holiday breaks at her family's farm in southwestern Wisconsin.

Even before that, and continuing on for years, I worked my way into my own tribe, a loose family of seafaring sorts -- long-distance cruisers, gunkholers, boat-builders. In my part of the world they, too, had a circuit: Texas Gulf Coast, the Mexican Caribbean, the Abacos, Bermuda, the Chesapeake ... it wasn't at all unusual to run into members of my hometown sailing club (and tellingly, it was the "sailing" club, not the "yacht" club) in Annapolis, or to meet a friend of a friend on Maryland's Eastern Shore, or see a familiar boat awaiting transit in Panama.

In Oxford, Md., a tidewater town founded during the historical Renaissance some four centuries ago, I was dropped-off to repair a boat and then deliver it back across the bay to Solomon's Island. I walked into my favorite watering hole there and asked the bartender where I could reprovision. He gave me directions, then threw me the keys to his truck.

Like Rennies, sailors help each other out, no questions asked. They are independent sorts, but loyal to the tribe; reluctant to be bound to the straight world of 9-5 drudgery, jealously protective of their freedom to pick up and go at a moment's notice.

Like other subcultures, the sailing -- especially cruising -- lifestyle comes with its own costumes, jargon and set of unwritten rules. Landlubbers, stinkpotters and wannabes stick out like sore thumbs.

But among the fraternity of cruising sailors, one can gain admittance by building skills and experience. Unknown drop-ins from over the horizon are welcomed if they can talk the talk and walk the (rolling) walk. Cred is awarded for miles under the keel and storms weathered.

Rennies are sometimes derided by the straight world as "those weird, hippie people;" sailors as "boat bums."

I seem to be drawn to both clans of dropouts from the mainstream.

Tamara asked me not long ago what I would like to see happen, with regard to bridging, with her, the gap between the straight world and the Ren world. I thought about it, and finally told her that -- best-case scenario, I'd like to be adopted by the tribe. At the very least, grudgingly accepted as a harmless interloper.

I'm not sure how to do that -- not sure, even, that it's anything I can somehow achieve on my own. It's important to me, though, because it speaks to some natural affinity; also, because it's important to Tam.

Patrick offered a clue to what might be one path. After we returned from a long day at Scarborough last weekend, we sat down to build catapults from a box of woodcrafting supplies Tamara had ordered weeks earlier.

We glued and rubber-banded various combinations of tongue depressors, clothespins and other parts together -- whose will hurl something farther, higher?

Later, when I was out of the room, my son turned to Tamara and asked thoughtfully: "So ... how many of these would we have to build to fill a booth?"

There be (no) monsters here

When I was 13, my folks offered me a choice between a sailboat and a horse. Being young and naive, I opted for the boat.

Boats, I reckoned, don't need to be fed, curried and exercised.

Right.

The practical effect of having a boat at my disposal, though, was that -- suddenly -- the 80+ square miles of Aransas Bay were mine to explore.

Looking back, and as a parent myself now, I can't imagine what the heck my folks were thinking when they dropped me off at sunrise and told me to be back for supper.

Oh, yes ... "Wear your life jacket," and "Don't forget to put on sunscreen!"

PFD buckled tight, my lunch, a gallon milk jug of tap water and a fishing rod stowed below the deck ... I'd take off. Sometimes I'd take a friend; sometimes I'd sail off all by myself.

I have wonderful memories of those days ... racing summer squalls off the Gulf, climbing mid-bay oil and gas production platforms and leaping into the cool, green waters ... hunting for mammoth teeth and fossilized sand dollars on the spoil islands; catching trout near an old, wrecked barge ... pacing curious dolphins who wondered, no doubt, just what kind of creature I was.

My mom worried about me, I know, and in retrospect I think it must have been my father who greenlighted those summer expeditions. As a youngster growing up on the shores of the same bay he was the proud skipper of an old skiff powered by a recalcitrant Montgomery Ward's 7.5hp outboard.

"It would usually get me to where I wanted to go," he's often said, "And then I'd row home."

I hope that, if I still lived in Rockport, I would allow my son to do the same at age 13.

I worry about my boy, though. And in that, I am not much different than most parents in the America of the early 21st Century.

Richard Louv, author of one of my favorite books of all time, Fly-Fishing for Sharks: An Angler's Journey Across America, in 2005 published Last Child in the Woods. It's a wonderful, thought-provoking look at what we are doing to our children by separating our kids from the outdoors.

Thought-provoking because Louv brings together a growing body of evidence that suggests the rise in childhood obesity, attention disorders and depression may be directly linked to what he calls "nature deficit disorder." Wonderful because he suggests ways that parents, educators, city planners, developers and others can begin to bridge the chasm between our children and the natural world.

One of the barriers Louv identifies that is keeping parents from allowing -- insisting on -- unstructured "play" time outdoors for their children is simply fear.

It's fear of strangers and fear of natural phenomena. We're afraid of sexual predators and crazed gunmen ... we're afraid of bears and lions, snakes and sharks. We're afraid of ... we're not even sure. We're just scared.

Fear of the unknown is nothing new; it's a fundamental human condition. In the dim, dark past -- four or five centuries ago, that is -- cartographers labeled the unknown: "There be monsters here."

But are there?

Perception and reality

Much of our fear stems not from our own experiences in the outdoors, but from news media reports that are ever more sensationalized. The 24-hour news cycle has networks, newspapers and local affiliates climbing over each other to grab our attention; it allows sensational stories to be reported again and again, and in greater depth than ever before.

A mountain lion attacks a child near Los Angeles, and within days sheriff's departments across Central Texas are flooded with calls about strange sounds in the night, missing pets, and shadowy glimpses of something large and tawny amongst the cedars.

News is the out-of-the-ordinary. News is tragedy. Disaster. Conflict. We don't watch what doesn't happen on TV. We don't hear about a perfectly enjoyable day in the outdoors for the simple reason that it is not newsworthy.

Supporting the notion that false perceptions sometimes outweigh reality, Louv quotes a Children's Defense Fund report from the mid1990s that claimed: "Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled."

The statement was widely reported in the mainstream media, though of course it is demonstrably false.

Prof. Joe Best of the University of Delaware debunks it: Were it true, in 1983, the number of American children gunned down would have been about 8.6 billion that year. In 1987, it would been greater than the estimated total of the world's population since the advent of humanity.

So what are the dangers to our children in the outdoors? Is nature likely to be lethal, or even very harmful?

On Aransas Bay -- and I've written elsewhere that I consider the more than 3,000 miles of Texas tidewater coastline to be a true wilderness, in many respects -- the answer is probably "no" (with a few caveats).

Dangerous people

Let's look at "stranger danger" first. That's the one I worry about most in relation to my own child, a bright, conscientious, level-headed 7-year-old.

The sad truth is, my son is probably at greater risk of falling victim to a predator in a shopping mall, on a neighborhood street or even his elementary school playground than on the waters of a Texas bay.

Predators congregate where the prey is. That's why lions hang out at watering holes on the Serengetti and trout and redfish pile-up at the mouths of sloughs and guts on an outgoing tide.

Since Jean Lafitte sailed away from the Texas coast a century and a half ago, our bays have been mostly free of folks who ply the waterways with the notion of harming others.

Peter Jenkins, the man who walked across the country, piloted a 25-foot Grady White alone from the tip of Florida to the Rio Grande back in the early 1990s.

On his journey around the Gulf of Mexico, he was threatened just once, when a couple of thugs attacked him in an effort to steal his boat as he entered Aransas Bay.

That shameful episode aside, it's almost certain the worst fate a young boater might face on our bays is indifference from a visiting angler unfamiliar with local mores (and international law, come to think of it) that dictate that a seafarer must always render aid to anyone in need on the water.

Drowning

Drowning, of course, is an ever-present danger when on, in or near the water.

In 2004, 270 people in Texas died due to drowning ... they included infants in bathtubs, children in the surf, boating accident victims and families attempting to drive across swollen waterways.

By way of comparison, the flu took 3,170 lives, peptic ulcers claimed 213 and 1,040 Texans died in falls.

Many of the drownings that occurred on public waters were the result of boating accidents. A quick look at the state's statistics show the coast, though, to be relatively safe. Last year, for instance, Lakes Travis and Cedar Creek each recorded three boating accident fatalities ...

Galveston Bay, one of the busiest bodies of water in the nation, had only two. Aransas Bay and the Gulf of Mexico: none.

No doubt this has something to do with who is using the water and how they're using it. On Lake Travis, it's often college-age partiers, and fast boats and alcohol play a role. On Aransas Bay, it's anglers and sailors.

My approach to keeping Patrick safe from drowning is straightforward: I've insisted he learn to swim; he always wears a life preserver when aboard a boat and when around the surf or dangerous currents I keep a close eye on him. It's the best I can do, right now, but enough to make me comfortable that his risk of drowning is very low.

Sharks and other terrors

Remember Jaws? I do ... it kept me out of the water for an entire summer. Sharks, as very efficient and sometimes very large apex predators rightly inspire respect from those who venture into their native habitat.

In locales where people mimic sharks' natural prey -- where a surfer's silhouette looks an awful lot like a seal on the surface, for instance -- there is some slight danger of becoming un snaquillo de tiburon.

In Texas, we have neither seals nor seal-snacking sharks. Not regularly, anyhow. We do, though, have half-ton tiger sharks roaming our beaches and those suckers can wolf-down sea turtles like popcorn.

In the bays and in our nearshore waters, schools of blacktips hunt mullet and other fish, and bull sharks -- some quite large -- nose through the mud after crabs and rays and redfish.

In Texas, there have been 32 recorded shark attacks. Of those, three were fatal, and the last one of those occurred seven years before I was born.

Even factoring in the entire United States, with Florida's and Hawaii's relatively higher numbers of attacks and fatalities, an individual is 10 times more likely to be killed by a dog than a shark.

Setting aside instances of sheer stupidity and poor judgment -- sailing under the bow of a tanker in the ship channel, or launching a boat in a tropical storm -- I've concluded that the greatest danger on the Texas coast arises not from two-legged villians nor from great beasts lurking below the waves, but from a critter so small you'd need a microscope to observe it.

Bad bugs

Okay, it's not even the greatest danger ... it's just my personal boogeybug because the effects are so nasty.

Bacteria from the Vibrio family include V. cholarea, which causes cholera ... it's a real problem in developing countries but not so much here. Cholera's cousin V. vulnificus, though, touches someone I know, or a friend of a friend anyhow, almost every year.

Vibrio can enter the body either through a wound (cut, scrape, blister) or through seafood. It's a common cause of "food poisoning" from eating oysters.

About a third of the three dozen or so reported Vibrio cases in Texas each year are caused by V. vulnificus, and about a quarter of those are fatal. The bug seems to be limited by both salinity (it likes salinities lower than seawater) and temperature (infections peak in warmer months ... of course, that's when most folks are in the water, too).

Meridith Byrd, a TPWD biologist who studies harmfal algal blooms and keeps up on other little critters, like Vibrio, grew up in the Texas Coastal Bend and she says she never worries about Vibrio.

Should I be concerned, I asked her?

"Nah, not unless you’ve got risk factors: liver disorders (hepatitis, cirrhosis), diabetes, immunocompromising conditions (HIV/AIDS, cancer, autoimmune disorder such as lupus), recent gastric surgery or take antacids for an ulcer, hemochromatosis (metabolic iron disorder)," she told me. "Vibrio is not something that routinely causes problems in a normal, healthy person. Ninety-nine percent of the cases that make the news involve a victim with an already-compromised immune system."

Those cases, though, are horrific.

Two buddies go fishing in Matagorda Bay. A couple of days later each experiences swelling, and redness on extremities and suffer fevers and other flu-like symptoms. They go the hospital and one ends up losing a leg below the knee. The other dies.

Or a fishing guide notices a cut on his hand has become infected. It gets worse, and several days later he's in the hospital with the flesh rotting away from his arm (which is now split open from his wrist to his shoulder). For the next six months, he faces a repeated regimen of surgical debridement.

The killing blow, from Vibrio, is septocemia -- a condition that occurs when the bacteria enters the bloostream and causes a systemic infection. About half who enter that stage of the disease don't recover.

Despite my personal horrified fascination with this littlest monster, the good news is, it's still relatively rare to contract Vibrio. Deer kill something like 50 times the number of people who die from Vibrio in Texas each year. Furthermore, treatment in the early stages is a simple round of antibiotics.

Let us be clear: the Texas coast is in some places a remote and very harsh environment. Anyone who ventures into it should be prepared: take plenty of drinking water and wear sunscreen.

Know how to operate your vessel and wear a personal flotation device. File a float plan and, if you can, make sure you have some means of communication (cell phones work some places, but much better is a handheld VHF radio).

As for Patrick, I'll continue to educate him about the dangers above and below the water and how best to avoid them. A lot of it is just common sense.

I'll prepare him as best I can to safely enjoy the wilderness so near us. And then, I sincerely hope, I'll be brave enough to turn him lose to explore it on his own.

We're already talking about his boat ... it looks now like it will be a 10-foot, stitch-and-glue constructed dingy. He says he'll call it "Rascal."

[The first image is a detail from Sunrise with Sea Monsters, by John Mallord William Turner (1775-1851. It hangs in the Tate Gallery, London.]

Everybody's sweetheart

[The best-laid plans and all that ... I wrote this a while back, and a lot has changed. Still ... it was fun while it lasted.]

It was sometime around week four in the boatyard when it occurred to me: “You know, I really need to put her name back on the transom.”

I called an old sailing buddy who also happens to be a local printer and sign maker, and “EQUANIMITY” was ready the following day.

It wasn’t the name on the boat when I bought her, and it wasn’t the name I had chosen, but the name she had borne for most of her life.

Amazing what $50 worth of vinyl and 30 minutes careful work did for my morale. My boat had a name again – her original name – and suddenly she was less a “thing” and more a living creature.

And boats with names – bright, new, shiny names -- I reasoned, don’t end up in the salvage yard.

You see, somewhere between week three and week five on the hard, I had begun to resent the old girl who was stubbornly resisting my attention. Halfway through filling and fairing 74 gel coat blisters, I was getting downright frustrated. The boatyard blues had set in, and my budding relationship with a 1964 Columbia 29 was not going quite as I had imagined it would.

Chalk part of that up to unrealistic expectations: when I responded to the brokerage ad on the Internet, I saw what I wanted to see: the classic Sparkman & Stephens lines and long, graceful overhangs; the sturdy, over-sized spar; the salty-looking, round opening port facing the bow.

Heck, I didn’t even have her hauled. She was floating when I signed the check, and that was good enough. I figured that, for the price of the survey, I could fix anything I found later.

What I discovered later was that of the six bags of sails I had cursorily examined, one was the original, 40-year-old mainsail; one was a Thistle-class main, one was a Catalina 27 main. None were in very good repair.

I discovered a suspiciously springy spot on the foredeck, and the aforementioned blisters. I found backing plates corroded beyond salvation and bulkhead doors literally falling apart.

As my work on the boat progressed I found a phone number for her next-to-last previous owner. As we began talking, I discovered a few more things.

For instance, when I had Equanimity trucked the 500 miles from Lake Texoma to Rockport, on the Texas Gulf Coast, I was bringing her home to the same boatyard that had hauled her out for the trip north three years ago.

At a cruisers’ rendezvous and party at Bahia Marina in Ingleside, the marina owner showed me my boat’s old slip and put me on the list for a new one. At the same party, a gentleman who was a member of my childhood sailing club sat down, asked me what I was sailing these days.

I told him, and he slapped his knee and said: “Doggone it, the original owner of your boat was one of my best friends!”

“George?” I asked, naming the last-but-one previous owner. “No,” he said, and named the fellow who bought my boat new and christened her, on Lake Lewisville, by the name she again carries.

It was on Lake Lewisville that the late Guy “Doc” Denton took his friend Richard Worstell sailing. Rich enjoyed the experience so much, the story goes, he became a sailor himself, opened a dealership and – later – bought Valiant Yachts.

Today a “Texas-built” Valiant is a desirable world cruiser.

Rich’s son Randy was the broker on the deal when I bought Equanimity.

After six weeks on the hard, splash day arrived and I sailed Equanimity a dozen or so miles south on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway to Ingleside. On the way, I was passed by a water-skier who waved and shouted: “Love your boat!”

Later, the same water-skier, with his wife, idled up behind us, held a hushed conversation, and then came alongside.

“We’ve known your boat for 15 years!” one exclaimed. “George is a very good friend of ours,” said the other.

As I rounded Ingleside Point, on the north shore of Corpus Christi Bay, the VHF sparked to life: “Equanimity, Equanimity, Equanimity …. This is Phoenix at Bahia Marina.”

“Where are you?” Scott, Phoenix’s skipper, asked. When I told him, he replied: “You’re about 15 minutes out ….” And gave me explicit instructions for piloting the channel into the marina.

It was the first time I’d ever heard of either Scott or Phoenix.
On the way in, another voice called from the dark channel bulkhead: “Ever been in here before?”

“The boat has, the skipper has, but never together,” I replied, laughing.

Once at our assigned slip, a crowd of sailors were on-hand to catch dock lines and make Equanimity fast.

Not too long ago, a long-time Bahia Marina resident stopped by and introduced himself. He, too, had sailed on my boat in years past. I invited him on board and showed him the work in progress. I told him of my early frustrations in the boatyard – the unpleasant surprises along the way.

Then I told him it was okay, I felt like I was earning the right to own my boat – earning my Equanimity.

“She’s everybody’s sweetheart,” he said. “Everyone around here loves this boat.”

Good old boats are like that, I guess. One person signs the check and holds the title, but that only gives the erstwhile captain the privilege of having the primary relationship; there are others, a whole network of sailors and dock walkers and friends and family.

Honestly, I feel like I belong to the boat rather than vice-versa. Around the marina I’m known as “the guy who bought Equanimity,” “the fellow who bought George’s old boat,” and – probably – “the youngest owner ever” of this 40-year-old plastic classic.

Already she has gained for me frequent admiring looks, several party invitations and more than one new friend.

George, who held Equanimity in trust for more than half her life, is one of the nicest guys you’d ever care to talk to.

That’s what everyone says and, judging by the number of friends and the kinds of stories they tell over adult beverages at dockside, I believe it.

Approaching 90, his very first words to me – in a gravelly cadence -- were: “So, I hear you have my mistress. She’ll steal your heart and pick your pocket …”

How long a properly maintained fiberglass boat can last is still an open question. As Equanimity approaches the half-century mark, I’m pretty sure she’ll outlast me.

Someday my trusteeship of the old girl will pass into someone else’s hands.

I can only hope it will be with half as many fond memories and as much goodwill as when I first came to know the boat that – around here at least – is everybody’s sweetheart.