Airborne is how William F. Buckley, Jr. describes his sail across the
wide Atlantic with his son and five friends. The trip, for fifteen years
a dream, for fifteen months a planned operation, was always a risk: one
doesn't set out haphazardly in a small sailboat across 4,400 miles of
ocean, and Buckley's account of perils of the sea as experienced by
himself since he acquired his first sailboat at age thirteen is at once
graphic, instructive, and terrifying. But, we learn quickly, the concern
is mostly for the prospect of thirty days and thirty nights away from
the cosmopolitan jungle to which he and his friends are accustomed;
their lair, so to speak. But it happened: notwithstanding vicissitudes
amusing, annoying, and even dangerous, suddenly the schooner, and the
entire trip, were airborne, and the experience resulted in a fusion of
hopes, fears, ambitions, and pleasures that lifts the book from the
category of mere chronicles of the sea, into a chronicle of our time, a
passage of the spirit.
