{"id":26,"date":"2017-02-12T22:56:04","date_gmt":"2017-02-12T22:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/?page_id=26"},"modified":"2017-02-12T22:56:04","modified_gmt":"2017-02-12T22:56:04","slug":"chapter-seven-form-sam-siber","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/chapter-seven-form-sam-siber\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter seven form Sam Siber"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was Mr. Thomas.\u00a0 He had lived on Great St. James as a boy some seventy years earlier\u2014which solved the mystery of the heavy-gauge wire that I had discovered imbedded in the two trees on the day that I stumbled into the plantation.\u00a0 His parents on St. Thomas had given <\/em>him to a family that was living in the old plantation ruins and raising livestock of some kind.\u00a0 (In those days if one family had more children than it could support and another needed an extra hand, children were given away.)\u00a0\u00a0 He told me which structures, now in ruins, had preceded his family (\u201cwe met it there\u201d) and which were built by the family that had raised him.\u00a0 He was unhappy with his confinement on the island, however, and so one night he tried to run away and almost drowned in the strong current running between Great St. James and the nearest inhabited island. His frightful description so many years after the event conveyed his terror with such clarity that one would think his perilous trial by water had occurred only an hour earlier.<\/p>\n

Mr. Thomas was familiar with our beach on the other side of the island, but had shunned it because of the mangineel trees.\u00a0 However, the shore along the cove where the plantation was located, now strewn only with rocks and pebbles, was itself once a beach when he was a boy, so he had not been deprived of a sandy shore.\u00a0 And no doubt he had combed his beach for exotic oddments, gazed out across the perilous current, and yearned to live on the inhabited island of St. Thomas whose lights sparkled in the distance at night.<\/p>\n

In later years, however, Mr. Thomas was not inclined to be romantically protective of the beach when the prospect of making money arose.\u00a0 For when he grew up and finally moved to St. Thomas he acquired a barge, scooped up all the sand from the beach where he had been raised, and sold it for the construction of streets in the town on the harbor of St. Thomas.\u00a0 Which was not at all an unusual enterprise from the perspective of history.\u00a0 For as long as mankind has been congregating in towns, it has been devouring the irreplaceable riches of the countryside, including timber, water, furs, oil . . . and sandy beaches.<\/p>\n

Peter continued to enjoy books in spite of his failing vision by renting audio books from the local library.\u00a0 Thus, he sat in his room listening to books, which he enjoyed immensely, and playing chess with himself.\u00a0 But probably as a result of being forced to become an inmate of urban society, he suffered a bout of walking pneumonia.\u00a0 His family and friends visited him when we could, and occasionally I brought him out to Great St. James for a day or so.\u00a0 He also sometimes went sailing with a friend and his wife who had purchased a sailboat and with visitors from Germany and elsewhere.\u00a0 But mostly he was on his own and spent a good deal of time observing the proceedings in the local legislature, whose members he deplored for their shortsightedness and alleged corruption.\u00a0 And he was happy to share his scorn with anyone who cared to listen.\u00a0 For Peter\u2019s will and hatred of hypocrisy remained as strong as iron regardless of the condition of his body.\u00a0 Frequently he even talked about sailing off again to the Galapagos Islands whose simple style of life, solitude, and absence of hypocrisy (though I suspect that Peter\u2019s expectations were quixotic in this respect) enshrined for him the ultimate remote paradise.<\/p>\n

Indomitable to the last, Peter took on the government over the parking and repairing of its Gargantuan garbage trucks in the compound below the windows of his retirement home.\u00a0 The noise, which occurred even during the evening hours, had become unbearable to Peter as well as to the other residents of the home, while the man in charge of the trucks refused to heed their complaints.\u00a0 So Peter made an audio recording of the racket outside his window with his little tape recorder.\u00a0 He took the tape to the radio station down the street and they put it on the air along with Peter\u2019s angry remonstrances.\u00a0 The governor heard the broadcast and promptly expelled the trucks from the area forever.<\/p>\n

I had been in the States on a visit to my family when I returned to the islands and was told by a mutual friend that during my absence Peter had died peacefully in his room.\u00a0 His daughter-in-law told me that he had been feeling tired and had said that he just wanted to \u201cgo to sleep.\u201d\u00a0 In deference to his wishes his visitors left him alone, and later that evening he died in his bed.\u00a0 He was 80 years old and the year was 1987.\u00a0 I had lost the only close friend I had made in the islands during my 18 years on Great St. James.\u00a0 Only a year later Brandy departed.<\/p>\n

Peter was well aware that life uses us up and then throws us away, so that we might as well squeeze as much out of it as we can before the trash man comes.\u00a0 And that\u2019s exactly what Peter did.\u00a0\u00a0 Among his triumphs were his mastery of one of the most demanding professions in the world with years spent under billowing sails on the high seas, women who adored and followed him across the earth, and charming, attractive children who themselves had adopted the sea as their m\u00e9tier.\u00a0 Per became an avid racer of small boats and had even been a contender in the Olympics, and his sister Anna was also a devoted sailor and joined her husband in skippering their day-sailing boat for tourists.\u00a0 Per\u2019s three children all worked in the water taxi business.\u00a0 In addition, Peter had garnered a crowd of friends and admirers on three continents, and won recognition by the press and the public for his intrepidity as a mariner while taking care of a family.\u00a0 And then there were the years of happiness in the West Indies and the South Seas, and an untold number of chess games \u00a0\u00a0These\u00a0 accomplishments and rewards enriched his life.\u00a0 And they bestowed a measure of happiness far surpassing that of men who are hostages to wealth, power, or piety, or whose dedication to humdrum occupations yields nothing more than money, security, and narrow horizons.\u00a0 For Peter was the incarnation of that spirit of venturesome curiosity and subversive natural living that has expanded the horizon of mankind and challenged the tyranny and hypocrisy of established institutions for thousands of years by dint of a mode of life and force of personality<\/em>\u2014what Max Weber called an \u201cexemplary prophet\u201d as contrasted with prophets who are merely emissaries of God, or \u201cemissary prophets.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Buddha, Diogenes, St. Anthony, St. Francis, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Jack London, and Joshua Slocum were his true forebears.\u00a0 He was also fond, incidentally, of quoting Jean Jacque Rousseau on the tyranny of private property.<\/p>\n

Peter, in other words, was an ascetic rebel (although with frolicsome interludes) in manifestation of one of the deepest impulses of man in western history.\u00a0 And it is particularly interesting that Peter\u2019s early rebellion, attested by his running away from home at the age of 16, might coincidentally have sprung from the same source as that of the major ascetic movements of the Middle Ages beginning with the anchorites of the African desert and culminating in St. Francis:\u00a0 rejection of the primacy of dogma, ritual, and worldly interests of the Church fostered by its growing power and wealth.\u00a0 For Peter\u2019s stepmother insisted on the strict observance of Catholic orthodoxy (his sister had become a nun, as mentioned earlier) including weekly attendance at church.\u00a0 When Brandy and I knew Peter he was outspokenly opposed to the Church and its arbitrary power over people\u2019s lives and minds. It is also possible that the loss of a more tolerant, natural mother at the age of six years had made him all the more rebellious toward the strictures of her successor, his churchly stepmother.<\/p>\n

It should be emphasized that Peter was far from being personally unqualified to cope with the demands of modern capitalist society and had become a ne\u2019er-do-well.\u00a0 Indeed, when the need arose to provide for a family in the West Indies, he became a successful small businessman by founding a business that has lasted sixty years, and which at this writing, incidentally, will soon be placed on the market by the ailing Per for a very handsome price.\u00a0 Thus, his repudiation of normal society during the many years before and after living in the West Indies can only be construed as voluntary.\u00a0 And although he could not entirely renounce the resources of society by living off roots and berries, he did the next best thing:\u00a0 he lived on its fringes.\u00a0 Mon fr\u00e8re, mon semblable.<\/em><\/p>\n

Luisa, his Samoan companion, died only a year after Peter\u2019s departure from Samoa, and it is doubtful that he was even aware of her death, according to one of his Samoan daughters.\u00a0 But his Samoan family does not vanish from our account at this point because several years after Peter\u2019s own death his two Samoan daughters journeyed to Red Hook to meet their half-brother and half-sister and their families.\u00a0 One of the Samoan daughters eventually became a housewife in California; the other, Rosanna, returned to the Village and today is living with Per and his wife and son.\u00a0 And the family is profoundly grateful for her presence because Per has been stricken with a form of Parkinson\u2019s disease and Rosanna has become indispensable in helping to take care of him.\u00a0 She has not turned her back on the sea that Peter loved, however, but is studying for a degree in marine biology at the local university.\u00a0 Moreover, two of Peter\u2019s children by Mama and four of his grandchildren have made their living on the water in the vicinity of St. Thomas and St. John.\u00a0 And so the great shroud of the sea rolls on for the Wanderer and his posterity as it rolled five thousand years ago.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As this was written by Sam Siber in 1997 for Peter\u2019s grandson Hans Dohm<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was Mr. Thomas.\u00a0 He had lived on Great St. James as a boy some seventy years earlier\u2014which solved the mystery of the heavy-gauge wire that I had discovered imbedded in the two trees on the day that I stumbled into the plantation.\u00a0 His parents on St. Thomas had given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-26","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27,"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26\/revisions\/27"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dohm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}