Stranded No More - 2023

May 2023 I received my honorary membership to the Explorer's Club. I'm not sure that my qualifications fit those of the other members; astronauts, Himalayan mountaineers, and deep-sea divers. The club was founded Admiral Robert Peary. My grandfather was his post-Arctic doctor in Westbrook, Maine, and his daughter, the Snowbird, was my grandmother's good friend, but my explorations concentrated on the social research of bars from the Jakarta docks, qat dens in the Masaii Plains, and quaffed champagne at Moet in Epinay not to mention how to score opium or 'Ma' on the Burma side of the Golden Triangle without being mistaken for a fucking DEA agent. Of course I have climbed mountains, free dover through caves off the Yucatan, and leapt off granite cliffs into the emerald waters of the Quincy Quarries

My travel days have been on hold for medical reasons. No getting on a plane until September, unless it's deadheading on a London-bound private plane to answer the need of a Kuwaiti prince. My mission helping him not lose at cards. He's the biggest loser in the world and the world's casinos love a rich loser.

Stranded on Clinton Hill for the foreseeable future I recalled reading a passage from Richard Burton, the famed Nile explorer, about how he was stranded in Trieste at the end of his life and felt like Robinson Crusoe. Waiting for ship to end his exile fromthe world. Last week I spoke with my around-the-world travel agent, John, at Pan Express. He was surprised to hear from me. Obviously he had thought last year's trip to visit my family in Thailand might have been my last.

"Sir, when are you traveling again?"

"Soon and I have a plan to recreate my first trip?"

"Are you going to Biak?"

"If possible."

"Sir, everything is possible for you now. welcome back." John and I go back thirty-three years.

"I'd love to stand of the veranda of the Dutch Hotel and have a European breakfast on Cendrawasih Bay."

He clapped his hands together and said, "Sir, you are back!!!" Like Richard Burton I was ready to stand someplace far from my death bed, for I still possessed a winning hand.

Explorer Club 9/16/2025 The Trophy Room

At the Explorer Club amidst the trophies. Other than killing millions of insects throughout my life I've only attempted slain one other creature. A seagull at age seven at the end of McKinley Road, Falmouth Foresides. 1959. With my good friend Chaney Noyes. We had taken darts from his house and walked to the bluff overlooking the lowtide mudflats of Portland Harbor. Back then there was a dock for the local fishermen. Seagulls harried the sterns seeking fish. I threw a dart at one. It struck it in the wing. It fluttered to the water or continued to fly away. I never tried tokill anything again, except for cockroaches and mosquitoes.

Peter Freuchen Explorer Club - Trophy Room

My grandmother Edith Hamlin gave me a book BOOK OF THE ESKIMOS by Peter Freuchen. I still have it. Two years ago I was pleased to meet him face to face with his portrait over the trophy room's fireplace at the Explorer Club. Edith Smith was good friends with Marie Peary, the Snowbird, daughter ofAdmiral Robert E Peary, one of the founder's of the club. I had thought my grandfather Frank A Smith had been his doctor in Westbrook, Maine after returning from his stint with the Royal Canadian Medical Expedition in France during World War I, but no one is left in my family who can verify that he might have been on service to the Arctic Explorer. Edith did speak about Marie on her death, bemoaning that Marie, a hard drinker, was going to outlive her. That she did, but I dropped Marie's name at the bar in the club and showed them BOOK OF THE ESKIMOS. I am still a member.

Explorer Club Trophy Room 9/16/2025

Yesterday I was in the explorer's Club. A member in good standing for the past two years. Visiting the trophy room with three friends I told them stories about how the skins and tusks and artifacts arrived here. Hunting and exploring. I myself possess an elephant's foot from Andy Reese, ballet dancer and film maker for Club 57. He bequeathed the item after his passing from AIDS back in the 1980s. In 1991 coming down the west coast of Sumatra I recall hearing a tiger roar in the distance. It sounded like it was behind me. Chills up and town my spine.

I check ed this message and discovered once more that I had misspelled and as adn. A common occurence as I have been blessed with manulysia, dyslexia of the fingers, which mihgt have to do with that I was born a natural lefthander, however the Sisters of St. Joseph at my parochial school south of Boston regarded that as a sin or lámh chlé in Gaelic. My nana called it Kithou, which might have meant something else. I write with my right hand, but deal cards with my left. I resisted change whenever I could.

Jim Lovell Into The Cosmos

Yesterday US astronaut and a long long time Explorers Club member Jim Lovell completed his mission on the planet Earth and Space.

“I realized it really was a triumph in the way people handled a crisis: Good leadership at all levels at NASA, the use of imagination and initiative to figure out how to get us home by using just what we had on board, the perseverance of people who kept on going when it looked like initially that we didn’t have a chance.… This is why Apollo 13 went from being a failure to a triumph.”

Down to The Sea RIP

Last July my fellow Explorers Club members Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet along with Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, were lost, when the Titan, a five-man pressurized submersible imploded on a dive to the RMS Titanic at the bottom of he North Atlantic. On the surface the support ship lost contact, a massive multi-national mission streamed to the rescue. All in vain, although the wreck was found without any of the crew. Death had to be instantaneous.

Yesterday evening the Explorers Club held a memorial for Hamish Harding, a deep sea and polar explorer. I was too sick from fish poisoning to attend. A bad piece of Hake, although it tasted good at the time of eating and I supposed going down the Titanic seemed a good idea in the height of summer. Seats for the three passengers cost $250,000. Stockon Rush had sworn the dive was safe without mentioning previous issues mainly that the carbon-titanium hull had been constructed from secondhand material from Boeing.

All that aside the sea is a cruel mistress.

The three passengers had sign waivers against any lawsuit in case of death.

They understood the risks, as anyone does who goes down the sea in ships.

Sadly a week earlier in the Ionian Sea off the coast of Pylos, Messenia, Greece, a fishing boat sank while carrying an estimated 400 to 750 migrants off the coast of Pylos, Greece. Hundreds drowned as the Hellenic Coast Guard watched under orders to not interfere. The world press ignored the story, as they might have a almost sinking of a ferry off Sulawesi. I was so glad we didn't go under the waves,

I have also endangered my life diving off the Quincy Quarry cliffs, free-diving through underwater caves off Isla des Mujeres, surfing Bingin Beach In Bali, playing softball against the Hells Angels for CBGBs, and motorcycling through the mountains north of Chiang Mai. I have died several times without the time to think I'm going to die and hopefully the same went for the crew of the Titan and the drowned migrants. Rest eternally under the sea.

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