Tuesday, September 16, 2014

The Pilar

The first time I heard about the Pilar or actively spoke about it was in 1974 when I was living with my great-uncle Leicester in Miami Beach. If my father mentioned it I was either too young to understand what he was talking about or it was just another boat that he and his dad happened to be fishing on when he was a boy in Bimini in the 1930s. Leicester was much more descriptive and in his biography of his brother there was a passage where he sees Ernest sitting in the fighting chair of the Pilar at sunset in Key West taking swigs from a bottle of rum. My grandfather was a tall man, as tall as my great-uncle, 6 ft., and strongly built, and back then his hair was still black and he had a moustache. The white beard would come later and the potbelly too. He was lean and young and Leicester writes that that was the first time that he noticed all the shrapnel wounds in his legs from the Austrian shell that had nearly killed him during the First World War.

It was a powerful image and one that stuck with me as I moved from one house to another from Florida to Connecticut to Los Angeles and then finally to Europe as a man. I could easily see him sitting there and smell the salt water in the bay and feel the slight rocking of a heavily built wooden boat in the waves.

Eventually my father would also write about the Pilar and the Nazi U-Boat hunting expeditions that Ernest would organize with a few friends and his captain, Gregorio Fuentes. Packing everyone aboard the Pilar with supplies and a homemade bomb that they intended to drop into the conning tower of an unsuspecting German sub, they would set out from Cojimar in search of trouble. A slightly suicidal mission if there ever was one. How they ever thought that they might get close enough to the U-boat to pull it off before they were machine-gunned into the Gulf Stream is beyond me, but that was the plan.

Luckily they never found the Germans except for my grandfather’s fatal encounter with them at the end of his posthumous novel Islands in the Stream. They were never shot at, the boat survived and Ernest fished aboard her until he left Cuba in 1960.



Today the Pilar is in dry dock on the grounds of his house the Finca VigĂ­a outside of Havana. It was painstakingly restored in 2007 and is kept under a steel awning that protects it somewhat from the elements. I say somewhat because when I saw it for the first time last Thursday I noticed that the varnish on the wood in the cabin had already started to chip and peel. What impressed me though was the size of the boat, something that photographs can never really convey. I could finally see it with my own eyes and imagine my grandfather standing on the flying bridge above the cabin because it was obvious now that it was strong enough to support someone as big as Ernest. Likewise I could see my Uncle Patrick as a young boy sitting in the fighting chair as he wrestled with a huge marlin for hours, just like the second son of the protagonist of Islands in the Stream does.


But the Pilar itself was an archive of dreams and past lives, which I could not avoid now in her presence. I could feel my father and my Uncle Leicester. I could sense their energy and their pathos and I knew that while they were gone and I missed them dearly that they would always be here in this place, with this boat.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

thank you for sharing your personal experience. I would love to visit there someday myself. I thoroughly enjoy reading your blog posts John. You haven't written much of late look forward to seeing something new soon.

Unknown said...

Hello, John...
I am not sure you will remember me, but I took care of you and your 3 siblings in 1969/70.
I went to University of Miami, and you and your younger sister looked like me...people used to think you both were mine, and I remember your sister loved the idea. I would have had to have given birth to you as a mere child, myself, but anyway, I loved the experience. You kids were great! I remember your youngest brother...an infant at the time....there was some question as to who his dad really was....

You guys were going through some tough & strange times...your mom was in pre mad school because your dad was paying for it, and wasn't very effective as a mom...

Please get in touch with me when you receive this...those were tough times for me too...and you and your brothers and sister were a shining light at a time of dimness for me, too.
Take care,
Candy (Candace Dunn)
candaceregisterednurse@gmail.com

Anonymous said...

Hemingway was cool then, and is cool now. The epitome of cool.

Timeless.

Thank you Hemingway. Thanks man.

Unknown said...

Great blog. I am a Hemingway fan, former history teacher, coach, and owner of what I believe is a Thomas fly rod owned and fished by Earnest Hemingway. I have a picture with Earnest hold it. I need more than a picture. I live in Kansas City where it was found in an attic among three other rods. I have questions. Can you halp me?

Jim Aziere
avid fly fisherman
writer
historian who want to save particles of the past