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Grizzly

What’ll You Do If You Meet a Grizzly?

The old Alaska hand was deep in conversation with an eager young backpacker. The old man was clad in canvas, and wore battered-but-serviceable boots. He was lean, hadn’t shaved in a few days, and looked a bit weary, but his eyes were alert. He fairly reeked of genuine backwoods experience.

The young man was clean-cut, almost shiny. He was clad largely in brand-new GoreTex, wore a pair of $600 hiking boots, and had lots of other high-tech gear stuffed inside his carbon-fiber-framed backpack.

The two of them were standing at the rail of one of the vessels of the Alaska Marine Highway. These are basically long-distance ferry boats, that range from Bellingham all the way out to Dutch Harbor. That’s about 3,500 miles worth of overwhelming vistas, dotted by towns, many of which are only reachable by sea or air. If you want to get from Hoonah to Tatitlek, and you don’t happen to have the money to hire a seaplane, you will likely be riding the Highway.

If you are picturing a trip on a cruise liner, you are sadly mistaken. The ships have cabins, but many passengers camp on deck, literally pitching their tents there, using duct tape instead of tent pegs to keep the tents from blowing away. There is a restaurant, but the campers are more likely to be found in the big cafeteria. And there are tourists, but a lot of the passengers are like the old man, just local folks making their way from one town to another, on Alaska’s forbidding coast.

The old man and the young hiker had at at first talked about the mountains and the glaciers they could see from the ship, then about some of the most interesting places to explore on foot, and then on to the fine points of pitching camp, cooking, and staying warm and dry. The old man was a font of sage, practical advice, seasoned with understated adventure stories. As he spoke, other passengers sidled in closer and closer, to catch his words of wisdom.

Eventually he said to the young man, “You’ll be in bear country. What’ll you do if you meet a Grizzly?”

This was not a casual question. Alaska is one of the few remaining places where you can have any expectation of encountering the magnificent Arctos Horribilis. People travel long distances for the chance, and there is a very-well-thought-out infrastructure designed to keep people safe. Attacks are extremely rare, but hikers who are  off by themselves are at an elevated risk of getting into trouble.

“Oh, got that covered,” said the backpacker, “I brought a .357 Magnum.”

“I see. Good pistol that. Powerful. But you’re going to want
to file that front sight down flush with the barrel.”

“File it down?”

“Yup, just file it down right flush and smooth.”

“Why?”

“Well that way it won’t hurt so much when the Grizzly Bear rams it up your ass.”

———————————————————————————————————————–

I have never been aboard those boats, but heard this story from the inimitable Guy Stevens, who witnessed the exchange. You can read another of his stories, about a problematic adventure in maintenance, in my audiobook/ebook Falling, available from Amazon and Apple Books. For those of you who prefer an actual printed copy, complete with signature, contact catalog@briontoss.com.
You can also read lots of other tales, about lots of other people, for free in the archives of my blog, at briontoss.com.

Done properly, a trip to bear country can be an exhilerating and survivable experience. If you are interested in going there, you might want to visit
https://www.nps.gov/articles/bearattacks.htm
(You’ll find links to related articles there, too. ). The photograph at the head of this post appears courtesy of the National Parks Service.

This just in: a link to a wonderfully informative piece on how to behave in bear country. Good writing, lots of useful data, and all the stories have happy endings. See: https://survivalmag.net/bear-safety-guide/

The Highway is in danger of losing much of its funding at the moment, due to dwindling oil revenues, but you can still book a trip: Alaska Marine Highway

Tas title 2

The Least Likely Festival in the World

         This year I had the great good fortune to journey to Hobart, Tasmania, to give a couple of talks at the biennial Australian Wooden Boat Festival. Courtesy of David Shering and his father John, I had a delightful sail in from nearby Kettering, aboard the 32ft. Hess cutter Ubique. I could tell you about that, or the warmth and vitality of all the people I met, or about the overwhelmingly beautiful array of vessels at the show, but instead I would like to talk about why the event has no business existing.

         See, any sensible festival organizer would choose a topic that has some chance of being interesting to a lot of people, and would stage it in a place that people would, you know, be able to get to. The organizers in Hobart did neither, choosing instead to promote, in an utterly remote location, an interest that lies at the unfortunate intersection of the appallingly archaic, the profoundly impractical, and the ruinously expensive. They might just as reasonably have hosted an antique car festival at the North Pole, or a mental health festival in Florida.

Sure, there are some oddball interests with a small-but-devoted following out there, but location matters. There is a reason that the world’s biggest cheese festival is in Cheshire, England, and that the world’s International Hair Freezing Contest (I am not making this up: https://www.thisisinsider.com/canada-hair-freezing-contest-photos-takhini-hot-springs-2019-2) takes place in the Yukon.

People who care deeply about wooden boats – or who are even aware that they still exist – are very few and far between, so if you have any hope of attracting more than a sliver of this tiny, ultra-specialized audience, you will need to locate the festival as close as possible to the greatest number of zealots. The obvious prime location is Western Europe, where people never throw away old stuff in general, and where the standard of living is sufficiently high that shipwrights can still make a living keeping ahead of the rot.

         Sure enough, if you take a look at Europe’s Atlantic Coast, and find the geographic center of the coasts of the British Isles, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, and Germany, and the navigable portions of Scandinavia, you will land more or less at the western end of Brittany.  And that is where, every four years, the Brest/Douarnenez festival happens. It attracts about 715,000 visitors, and about 9,000 sailors, on 1,500 boats, from 25 different countries. Huge, right? But consider, Oktoberfest draws ten times  that many tourists, every year. Even with strategic placement and a spectacular array of boats, the boat festival attracts fewer people than the Polish Woodstock Festival (I am not making this up, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol%27and%27Rock_Festival).

         Okay, now where do you suppose the second-largest wooden boat festival is held? New England, where olde money might be expected to subsidize this manifestation of elegance? Nah, maybe 100 boats in Mystic every year. California, maybe from tech zillionaires chasing the latest fad? In your dreams.

         Okay, how about my beloved Port Townsend, which has held its Wooden Boat Festival every year since 1977? We are home to a fanatically devoted collection of shipwrights, boatbuilding is part of the curriculum at our local high school (https://nwmaritime.org/youth-programs/maritime-discovery-programs-serve-over-200-students-this-spring/ ), and after you graduate you can move on to the grownup’s wooden boatbuilding school just down the road in Hadlock. Boats are deep in our culture. And as if that weren’t enough, Seattle is home to yet more tech zillionaires, as well as other well-to-do, oddball-interest-inclined people. As a result, as many as 40,000 people show up here in September, to see 200 to 300 boats. That’s pretty respectable, all things considered. But, though I am sad to say it, we are in fact a distant third in the Least Likely Festival attendance sweepstakes. The actual second place spot is held by …. Hobart, Tasmania.

         Right, you say, sure you say. As if this tiny island, situated about as far as possible from any other place on earth – except for Australia, which is also situated as far as possible from any other place on earth — is going to draw more than, say, a few hundred locals to a wooden boat event. Right. Sure. But they do. Somehow, every other year, over 200,000 visitors travel a minimum of 700 miles (that’s if you already happen to be in Melbourne) to see about 550 boats, plus innumerable artisans, musicians, toolmakers, authors, educators, and representatives of every other trade even remotely associated with wooden boats, all arrayed along a mile of waterfront in downtown Hobart.

         Clearly this is impossible. But Hobart is a wonderful, magnetic, odd, magnificent place, an outpost of the old British Empire, founded when about half of the Europeans in the area were in penal colonies. Magisterial buildings and medieval-seeming winding streets are overlaid with contemporary technologies and Aussie swagger, to create an environment that is simultaneously formal, rustic, and full of chutzpah. Which is why it is also home to the World’s Least Likely Major Art Museum, the MONA, where a poop-making machine and a musical trampoline vie for attention with an overpowering light show, and a waterfall that spells out live Google searches, alongside more conventional art pieces (https://mona.net.au/museum). Like the boat festival, the MONA should by all rights not exist, and probably neither of them would, anywhere outside of Tasmania. This is Australia’s poorest state, a sort of Outback Appalachia, its logging and mining glory days long in the past. But it is also, well Australian, to a degree that frankly makes the rest of the country look like — forgive me — New Zealand, so it brings a formidable amount of grit and playfulness to every occasion, which tends to attract outrageous outliers like MONA, unlikely-but-burgeoning tech startups, the world’s first Green political movement, and of course the wooden boat festival. In Tasmania, weirdness wins.

 

For more about the festival: https://m.facebook.com/AWBFestival/

With John Shering, (left) aboard Ubique. Photo by David Shering

A parting note: My most recent book, “Falling,” is now available as an ebook and as an audiobook, from Apple as well as Amazon. To get your copies, click Here for Amazon, or visit the ibooks store if you are on a Mac.

If you would like to go old-school and get an actual book, complete with autograph, write to catalog@briontoss.com. Be sure to specify who you would like the book dedicated to.

Coming Home

'We have been away from home, away from our lovely and familiar home. Unlike some places I could name, Port Townsend is not a nice place to leave; it exerts a gravitational field that tends to keep one close, keeps one wanting another day here, and another, and another. It is not exactly a paradise -- the police have plenty to keep them occupied, greed and short-sightedness are an ongoing threat, etc. -- but when we came back, after a month away, I was reminded how delightful my life is here, how the sail loft and the shipwrights and the smart-ass baristas and the Rose Theater and the whale-watching boats and all the other features and activities and personnel here add up to a town that is worth staying in, worth celebrating and savoring, and I found myself wondering why we had left in the first place. It is true that other places have charms of their own, and that one must leave home to experience those charms. I’ll get back to that in a bit. But there is something intrinsic to humanity that leads one to wander. When I was young, my family moved nearly every year, driven by my father’s restlessness. And he wasn’t exactly an outlier; post WW II it seemed the whole country was uprooting itself, in search of a fresh start. In any event, the lifestyle suited me. In the words of a song, The road was like a dream, The arrival an awakening, And into a new neighborhood I ran. But it soon lay all discovered, And I began to yearn For an unfamiliar light On an unfamiliar land. Some people, it seems, never lose that urge to wander, but for me it became an exhausting process, especially as I began to discover that staying in one place for a while could reveal virtues and verities that are invisible to the nomad. Engaging, rich duration can be fulfilling in a way that brief intensity never can. Of course, staying put is an infamous path to a stultifying life. Many people escape from the hamster wheel of constant travel, only to find themselves on a suburban treadmill. And many never give into the urge to wander in the first place. Too much of either, and what should be a setting for mutual support and affection can take on overtones of mutual bitterness and resentment. Robert Frost was thinking of this kind of place when he said that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” I think there must be an algorithm for human social equilibrium, with variables like history, age distribution, population density, etc. If such an algorithm exists, then some degree of novelty, or uncertainty -- or even outright instability -- must be included. If we occasionally cast ourselves into the strange and wild outlands, it is at least in part because they inform and define our places of shelter. So we are back at home, having done our part to unsettle ourselves, and this place, and now we resume doing our best to conserve it. We vote, we attend a crowded Power-Point-intensive meeting on the Port’s budget, we attend an equally crowded slide show by “Spawn Till You Die” artist Ray Troll. We do laundry, tend a sick old cat, put rigs into boats, have tea with friends, go to the dentist, check mooring lines. We do the things that help bolster and preserve this place we love, and all the while, in the background, is the memory of the road. Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things. Let very old things come into your hands. Let what you do not know come into your eyes. Let desert sand harden your feet. Let the arch of your feet be the mountains. Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps and the ways you go be the lines on your palms. Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing and your outbreath be the shining of ice. May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words. May you smell food cooking you have not eaten. May the spring of a foreign river be your navel. May your soul be at home where there are no houses. Walk carefully, well loved one, walk mindfully, well loved one, walk fearlessly, well loved one. Return with us, return to us, be always coming home. - Ursula LeGuin'

We have been away from home, away from our lovely and familiar home. Unlike some places I could name, Port Townsend is not a nice place to leave; it exerts a gravitational field that tends to keep one close, keeps one wanting another day here, and another, and another. It is not exactly a paradise — the police have plenty to keep them occupied, greed and short-sightedness are an ongoing threat, etc. — but when we came back, after a month away, I was reminded how delightful my life is here, how the sail loft and the shipwrights and the smart-ass baristas and the Rose Theater and the whale-watching boats and all the other features and activities and personnel here add up to a town that is worth staying in, worth celebrating and savoring, and I found myself wondering why we had left in the first place.
It is true that other places have charms of their own, and that one must leave home to experience those charms. I’ll get back to that in a bit. But there is something intrinsic to humanity that leads one to wander. When I was young, my family moved nearly every year, driven by my father’s restlessness. And he wasn’t exactly an outlier; post WW II it seemed the whole country was uprooting itself, in search of a fresh start. In any event, the lifestyle suited me. In the words of a song,

The road was like a dream,
The arrival an awakening,
And into a new neighborhood I ran.
But it soon lay all discovered,
And I began to yearn
For an unfamiliar light
On an unfamiliar land.

Some people, it seems, never lose that urge to wander, but for me it became an exhausting process, especially as I began to discover that staying in one place for a while could reveal virtues and verities that are invisible to the nomad. Engaging, rich duration can be fulfilling in a way that brief intensity never can.
Of course, staying put is an infamous path to a stultifying life. Many people escape from the hamster wheel of constant travel, only to find themselves on a suburban treadmill. And many never give into the urge to wander in the first place. Too much of either, and what should be a setting for mutual support and affection can take on overtones of mutual bitterness and resentment. Robert Frost was thinking of this kind of place when he said that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
I think there must be an algorithm for human social equilibrium, with variables like history, age distribution, population density, etc. If such an algorithm exists, then some degree of novelty, or uncertainty — or even outright instability — must be included. If we occasionally cast ourselves into the strange and wild outlands, it is at least in part because they inform and define our places of shelter.
So we are back at home, having done our part to unsettle ourselves, and this place, and now we resume doing our best to conserve it. We vote, we attend a crowded Power-Point-intensive meeting on the Port’s budget, we attend an equally crowded slide show by “Spawn Till You Die” artist Ray Troll. We do laundry, tend a sick old cat, put rigs into boats, have tea with friends, go to the dentist, check mooring lines. We do the things that help bolster and preserve this place we love, and all the while, in the background, is the memory of the road.

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
– Ursula LeGuin

By generous permission

The Constitution

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'A deckload of passengers'

By wonderful chance, I was invited aboard the USS Constitution for its annual tug-powered turnaround. This is ostensibly an utterly mundane exercise, meant to assure the even weathering of the wooden hull, but it has become an occasion for a party, involving a fireboat escort, 17-gun salutes, and an impressive number of admirals and other VIP’s, along with enlisted personnel, civilian workers, and assorted fans of square-riggers, history, and all things nautical.
This year marks the 220th anniversary of the vessel’s launch. That, plus the fact that the vessel has been undergoing restoration in drydock for the past two years, made for an extra-lively party. Here are some impressions of the day:
Amidships, I learn, from a fighter pilot, that ticks do not climb trees; they only get as far up as bushes. And tick-borne illnesses – of which there are hundreds besides Lyme Disease – are frequently misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue.
By the foremast, a passenger holds forth on the technical requirements for producing gluten-free beer, including how many parts per million can be present without passing the threshold for celiac disease.
There’s an actual purser aboard, with actual purser’s “slops,” only instead of the garments that his predecessors provided for the crew, this purser has boxes of coins, T-shirts, flags, and other memorabilia for sale to visitors. I obtained a flag, which one of the crew helped me to hoist, strike, and fold, as a keepsake. Yes, I now possess a U.S. flag that was flown, for about 5 seconds, from the mizzen of the U.S. Constitution, under way.
A former captain describes how his daughter was christened in the ship’s bell. They took the bell down, inverted it, filled it with water, and held the ceremony back by the wheel. Apparently this is a common practice.
Officers discuss the effects on the human body of the sounds of 40mm cartridges of the Constitution’s signal cannons, vs the 45mm cartridges of the guns at Fort Point and the Boston Coast Guard base. There really is a difference: the report from the smaller shell is definitely loud – ear plugs were handed out to all aboard – and you can feel it as well as hear it; but the 45’s, even at some distance, have a notable concussive effect that is almost like a physical blow.
Jose Hernandez-Juviel, who describes himself as the Constitution’s first Cuban rigger, raised 7 mice in the topmast and t’gallant rigging during the refit. No, he was not a foster parent for rodents; mice are fattened portions on some stays, that act as stops for sliding eyes, for reasons of obscure antique rigging architectural design.
One of the volunteers speaks of making leather cartridge bags by hand, while seated in front of his TV. Volunteers are very much a part of the ship, providing support at the museum as well as aboard. Some of them participate in an historical reenactment group, as uniformed and suitably armed members of an 1812 honor guard.
Bruce, one of the shipwrights, speaks of the challenge of making a 25-foot-long cutwater during the recent rebuild. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, it is the outer curve of the stem of a ship. On the Constitution it is not only massive, but fantastically complicated to make, and tricky to install (this involved throughbolts 12ft long).
Bruce’s buddy Tom talks about the strenuous delight of replacing over 3,400 pieces of copper sheathing below the waterline.
John, another shipwright, points out a heart he recently made for one end of the main lower stay, from a block of lignum vitae about 18” x 12” x 12”. It is nowadays very difficult to find blocks of this wood of any dimension, but the Navy has stockpiles of it, probably because they also use it for shaft bearings in nuclear submarines.
And Billy Rudek, who invited me for the event, talked about how planks in need of bending should be steamed for one hour per inch of thickness, so for the 7” thick(!) planks, they started steaming the moment they got to work, and then ran with the 40-foot-long pieces to the bending jig, to get them formed before it was time to go home.
One of the enlisted crew (aka docent’s mates), while leading a tour, said that the vessel’s masts were raked aft in order better to bear the force of the wind from astern. I have heard similarly bizarre and unfounded proclamations from other crewmembers, and am not really sure if they are just messing with people, or their instructors are not well-informed on some topics, but I do know that many of the crew are genuinely enthusiastic about the ship, and their enthusiasm is infectious.
There were many more conversations that I heard snatches of while drifting around the deck, involving climate, anthem-kneeling, traffic jams, college tuition, restaurants, a funeral, home prices, computer programs, health care, horses, promotions, etc., and of course I heard only a tiny fraction of the conversations going on amongst this deck-load of passengers. This was a microcosm of our society, a sampling of a free people who, for various reasons, ended up celebrating together the birthday of a beautiful/archaic artifact. As I am opposed in principle to needless violence, you might suppose that I would be conflicted about such attention being paid to a warship. But consider: this vessel, even if it had working cannons, would be utterly useless in a modern naval battle. It is not, I think, primarily a symbol of military might, but of integrity, liberty, and community. It is as though the furious destructive force that it was made for has largely distilled away, leaving behind the grace and artisanship and elegant engineering that previously were at best secondary considerations. It has come to represent, not our power, but our aspirations.
There are several definitions for the word “constitution.” Here is my favorite: The structure, composition, physical makeup, or nature of something, i.e., the constitution of society.

The Eastern Shore

'Chestertown parking meter'

The parking meters in downtown Chestertown, Maryland have “free parking” written on them. All of them. I am guessing that, when bloated big box stores sprang up outside of this classic colonial-era town, sucking all the zest and commerce out of the place, the demand for parking spaces plummeted, the meters became just another excuse to visit Walgreen’s, and free downtown parking was adopted as one tactic designed to lure people back. But Chestertown went one step further; on the sidewalk side of the meter there’s an invitation to drop in your spare change, to support local arts organizations. So every few feet, on both sides of the street, visitors have a painless way to support the kind of vibrant, varied, and enriching experiences that make this a great destination in the first place. Plus, it is weird, giddy fun to feed a parking meter without seeing the act as an odious necessity. Christian and I laughed as we pumped in all our quarters, dimes, and nickels. We searched the car for more. We returned a second day, partly in order to stuff ourselves with crab (see below), but largely in order to giggle while stuffing the meter. Good idea, Chestertown.
A note on cuisine: the national dish of Maryland, at least in the summer, is crab. Crab cakes, crab salad, crab omelets, crab melt, crab sandwiches, crab Benedict, crab hash, crab soup, crab-stuffed mushrooms, crab pizza, crab imperial, deviled crab, and for all I know crab ice cream and crab whiskey. Other foods are available, but basically they are a garnish for crab.
I was on the Shore, for rig surveys, including one in Solomon’s Island This one went okay, in a these-five-things-will-kill-you-it’s-time-to-rerig sort of way. In the process of delivering the bad news, I got a chance to watch Actual Chesapeake Working Watercraft in action. By “action” I mean one of the most demanding tests of handling small craft under power: backing into a ridiculously tight space, with a foul breeze, with everyone watching, and doing so with utterly unaffected, industrial-grade insouciance and skill. The boats were of a type called a “Deadrise.” They are narrow, low-slung, 20 to 40ft long, an evolution of the Skipjack. They are named, with complete lack of irony, things like “Shady Lady,” “Aquaholic,” and “Some Beach.” They go out for crab in the summer and oysters in the winter, and I am sure that the Chesapeake is capable of making life in a semi-open boat really interesting; the skills required for this work run well past mere parking.
Survey done, I headed down to St. Mary’s to visit my wonderful old friend Will Gates, with whom I worked during the rerig of the barque “Elissa.” That was 35 years ago. No, that can’t be right, because that would make me way over 50, which is ridiculous. But through some oddity of space and time, Will and his spouse Tara have managed to acquire 3 grown children, and Will claims to have been skipper of the 17th-century replica “Maryland Dove” for 28 years. I will humor him in that claim, but I have no doubt that the ‘Dove” is a beautiful boat, beautifully kept. Volunteers as well as paid staff host hordes of schoolchildren all year, and the boat gets out for sails on the Bay several times a year.
As the day was drawing down, and my in-depth tour of that splendid ship was done, we stood by to catch the mooring lines of a contemporary sailboat with engine trouble. It was a 40-some ft cruising yawl, with a man at the helm who wore a look of mixed determination and sadness. It was a warm, calm, lovely late afternoon. While fussing with mooring lines we made our introductions. I then asked him what design his boat was. He looked at me for a moment, then looked away. “I don’t remember,” he said. “That is why I have to give up this boat. I am out for one more cruise.” Then he told me his name, and asked me what mine was.
As darkness fell, I drove back to Chestertown. We are so briefly in this world.

Annapolis, Coda

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No automatic alt text available.

 

On the outskirts of Annapolis there is an eatery called “Carlson’s Donuts and Thai Food Restaurant.” No, really, there really is. We went there one night, at the end of the boat show, with our dear friend Pam Wall, a woman who appears to be a cross between Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Wonder Woman, and a particularly mischievous elf. Pam, along with her late, much-missedhusband Andy, cruised the seas for years in their 39ft. cutter “Kandarik,” and now Pam counsels, coaches, and educates would-be cruisers, telling them what they need to take with them, what they think they need to take with them but actually don’t, how to relate to the assorted cultures and bureaucracies they will encounter, and all the other details that maximize the possibility that their voyaging will be the kind of lyrical, fulfilling adventure that they have dreamt it would be, and not the horrifically expensive, hazardous, soul-killing, and exhausting disaster that it by all odds actually should be. Pam is their guide, mentor, reality check, cheerleader, and, when needed, the are-you-kidding-me slap across the face that we all need once in a while.


On a different outskirt of Annapolis you will find Chesapeake Bay Sailmakers, and this past weekend the loft hosted a rigging workshop taught by yours truly, produced by Mia and Andy Schell, two utterly capable, ridiculously young, and infectiously enthusiastic sailors, who, like Pam, make a living helping others to learn how to do what they love to do. They are all adventurers who have returned to our world to say, “We are not special, but we have seen marvels, seen beauty; we wish to share these wonderful things with you.”


Mia and Andy’s method is at the experiential end of the spectrum; they take would-be cruisers out on extended trips aboard their magnificent 48ft Swan “Isbjorn,” to show first-hand what this voyaging thing is all about. It can be a delusion-shattering exercise, and tends to weed out those who hadn’t realized that offshore sailing is a sequence of grueling, terrifying, boring, and ecstatic events, with no guarantee of the latter. Those foolish enough not to be dissuaded by the experience are probably doomed to become cruisers.
To help dissuade a broader audience, Mia and Andy also host a marvelous podcast (“On the Wind”), as well as live workshops, like the one they invited me to teach. Over the course of a weekend I did my best to help them in their mission, describing all the rig-related horrors that cruising sailboats are subject to. Despite my best efforts, no one ran screaming from the room, no one decided to take up taxidermy or ice-skating, and everyone asked pertinent, sensible questions. I fear there is no hope for any of them.
Later this week I’ll be surveying the rig of a Valiant belonging to two of the students. Over the years I have treated cruising vessel surveys with ever-increasing gravity and attentiveness. These are vessels that will carry a hopeful crew towards beauty, towards fulfillment, towards awareness. I want to do what I can to make sure that at least my corner of things is as good and sound and user-friendly as it can be.


Before leaving Annapolis, we visited the Naval Academy Museum. The second floor is entirely given over to a stupendous array of ship models from the age of sail. The smallest are the size of a shoe, but a fantastically detailed, exquisitely rendered shoe. The larger models can be two feet long, or more, and the level of skill that went into them is such that, after a while, one can forget that one is looking at a model, and start to feel what the actual ship must have been like, how its massive hull dwarfed the tiny humans it sheltered, what it must have been like to venture upon the sea in it. Most of these were construction models, built as guide and inspiration for the construction of the actual ship, so perhaps there is some quantum entanglement going on here.


But along the back wall is a collection of an entirely different kind of model. These were built by French prisoners of war while they were held captive in England during the Napoleonic wars. The prisoners were destitute, and sometimes living in appalling conditions, but they weren’t about to sit around and winge; instead they collected scraps of cattle bones – cattle bones! – and fashioned them into planks and spars and cannons and all the components of full-rigged ships. They did so with stunning artistry, really unbelievable skill.


These builders offered their work for sale to the British public, making something of a living from that. But this kind of creation cannot be explained on mercantile principles. These were sailors who had been to sea, had fought storms on the sea, had fought battles on the sea. The models were their testimony. They were, I think, saying, “We are not special, but we have seen marvels, seen beauty; we wish to share these wonderful things with you.”

Annapolis

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Oct 12, 2017 3:23am
'Annapolis Annapolis is the site of the U.S. Naval Academy, where bright, determined, patriotic young people come to learn how to command the most powerful naval force that the world has ever seen. It is also the site of the annual Annapolis boat show, where by-definition lackadaisical, undisciplined, impractical dreamers come to see the latest means by which they can get into serious trouble afloat. This seems an odd juxtaposition, like staging historic military reenactments outside West Point, or radio-controlled model airplane conventions at the Air Force Acad– wait, I just Googled those things, and it turns out they actually happen. Maybe we in the private sector seek to emulate, however faintly, those whose job it is to go in various iterations of harm’s way, who are in touch with the Wild, danger, spiritual and physical challenges, and other things that give meaning and zest to life. They are just more organized about it. Meanwhile we, at the moral-equivalent-of-war end of the spectrum, seek the same things, but must fabricate our own relationship with great forces; sailing, again by definition, puts us at the nexus of wind and wave energies, throws in a laughably fragile, unstable platform, and for good measure gets us as far as practicable from provisions, spare parts, and any form of aid if (actually, when) things go wrong. Sailing is a big, beautiful, slightly dangerous dance, and the boat show is where we go to accessorize. This year, the devastation in the Caribbean highlighted how dangerous things can get, but that just seemed to add an edge to the pastime. There were of course boats for sale, many of which were so drenched in technology that they could probably be piloted from your condo in Aspen, and a few of which were both seaworthy and relatively (very relatively) affordable. But there were hundreds of vendors there, selling everything from parachute drogues to sunglasses to EPIRB’s to propellers – anything you might conceivably need or want to cram onto or into the absurdly space-constrained artifact called a sailboat. Sailors wandered the aisles, muttering to themselves and each other, making notes, asking questions that they hoped would prompt useful answers, and standing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed as the vendors went into carefully-scripted, possibly accurate descriptions of their products’ virtues, along with equally carefully-scripted, probably distorted allusions to the products of the competition. Most boat shows are held in climate-controlled buildings, or in outdoor climates amenable to human metabolisms. But this is an outdoor show in coastal Maryland, where 90 degrees at 90% humidity is considered a dry heat, and people take saunas to cool off. This Northwest boy spent the days drenched in perspiration; if I’d had a bay leaf I could have made soup. But those same sweltering days brought a wonderful parade of old friends. And new friends, too, like Brian Gifford, a rigger from South Carolina who haunted our booth throughout the show, practicing knots and splices, discussing installation and maintenance techniques, and acting as our official photographer. And Billy Rudek, rigger from the USS Constitution (see picture) who stopped by and described some of the finer points of the staying of that grand old vessel. And the retired carpenter whose questions about high-modulus rigging somehow segued into an entrancing description of technologically-informed meditation techniques. And our Airhead neighbors (I am not dissing them; they make a composting toilet of that name) whose carefully-scripted, entirely accurate descriptions often wandered off into scatologically-hilarious-yet-somehow-inoffensive-and-distinctly-informative asides. And on and on, throughout the days, human beings prepping for adventure and fun, prepping to embrace hazards joyfully, as opposed to those who prep for hazards by building futuristic, hermetically sealed shelters and filling them with freeze-dried food. Although there is probably a convention for them, too. Right outside NASA headquarters.'

Annapolis is the site of the U.S. Naval Academy, where bright, determined, patriotic young people come to learn how to command the most powerful naval force that the world has ever seen. It is also the site of the annual Annapolis boat show, where by-definition lackadaisical, undisciplined, impractical dreamers come to see the latest means by which they can get into serious trouble afloat. This seems an odd juxtaposition, like staging historic military reenactments outside West Point, or radio-controlled model airplane conventions at the Air Force Acad– wait, I just Googled those things, and it turns out they actually happen. Maybe we in the private sector seek to emulate, however faintly, those whose job it is to go in various iterations of harm’s way, who are in touch with the Wild, danger, spiritual and physical challenges, and other things that give meaning and zest to life. They are just more organized about it.
Meanwhile we, at the moral-equivalent-of-war end of the spectrum, seek the same things, but must fabricate our own relationship with great forces; sailing, again by definition, puts us at the nexus of wind and wave energies, throws in a laughably fragile, unstable platform, and for good measure gets us as far as practicable from provisions, spare parts, and any form of aid if (actually, when) things go wrong. Sailing is a big, beautiful, slightly dangerous dance, and the boat show is where we go to accessorize. This year, the devastation in the Caribbean highlighted how dangerous things can get, but that just seemed to add an edge to the pastime.
There were of course boats for sale, many of which were so drenched in technology that they could probably be piloted from your condo in Aspen, and a few of which were both seaworthy and relatively (very relatively) affordable. But there were hundreds of vendors there, selling everything from parachute drogues to sunglasses to EPIRB’s to propellers – anything you might conceivably need or want to cram onto or into the absurdly space-constrained artifact called a sailboat. Sailors wandered the aisles, muttering to themselves and each other, making notes, asking questions that they hoped would prompt useful answers, and standing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed as the vendors went into carefully-scripted, possibly accurate descriptions of their products’ virtues, along with equally carefully-scripted, probably distorted allusions to the products of the competition.
Most boat shows are held in climate-controlled buildings, or in outdoor climates amenable to human metabolisms. But this is an outdoor show in coastal Maryland, where 90 degrees at 90% humidity is considered a dry heat, and people take saunas to cool off. This Northwest boy spent the days drenched in perspiration; if I’d had a bay leaf I could have made soup. But those same sweltering days brought a wonderful parade of old friends. And new friends, too, like Brian Gifford, a rigger from South Carolina who haunted our booth throughout the show, practicing knots and splices, discussing installation and maintenance techniques, and acting as our official photographer. And Billy Rudek, rigger from the USS Constitution (see picture) who stopped by and described some of the finer points of the staying of that grand old vessel. And the retired carpenter whose questions about high-modulus rigging somehow segued into an entrancing description of technologically-informed meditation techniques. And our Airhead neighbors (I am not dissing them; they make a composting toilet of that name) whose carefully-scripted, entirely accurate descriptions often wandered off into scatologically-hilarious-yet-somehow-inoffensive-and-distinctly-informative asides. And on and on, throughout the days, human beings prepping for adventure and fun, prepping to embrace hazards joyfully, as opposed to those who prep for hazards by building futuristic, hermetically sealed shelters and filling them with freeze-dried food. Although there is probably a convention for them, too. Right outside NASA headquarters.

The East

The map of the U.S. looks like it was speeding eastward, ran into a wall at the Atlantic, and the seaboard states acted as a crumple zone. This is probably not what happened; it is more likely that the level of technology of governance, the assorted aspirations and identities of different groups of colonists, and assorted accidents of history conspired to make most of the first states rather teensy.
Nevertheless, the seaboard states seem compacted, intensified, and perhaps slightly concussed. Out West, it can take a good day to drive at 60 across some states; you can walk across Rhode Island in that time. But it isn’t as though Montana, for instance, had been cut into very small pieces, each one a state, but that you had instead compressed everything there into an impossibly small area, and then raised the population an order or two of magnitude. It’s like building a singularity out of humans, and as with a singularity there’s an immensely powerful gravitational well that keeps everyone and everything in, and is always trying to draw even more in. Every Eastern state, no matter how godforsaken corrupt, corroded, and crowded it might look to our eyes, is inhabited by people with a fierce sense of identity and pride of place. Okay, and despair and bitterness too, but work with me here. People strive here, in a way that most people from the other Coast cannot readily comprehend, let alone emulate.
This impression is amplified after the long jaunt by train across the broad, open plains. Out there the landscape goes by like this: farm……..farm……..town…….. forest……..city……..suburb……..farm……..industrial eyesore (factory, refinery, mill, etc)……..mountains……..farm……..and so on. But after Chicago or thereabouts, it turns to suburb…eyesore…farm…farm…town…hills-they-call-mountains…town…farm…eyesore…city…suburbs…eyesore…forest…and so on. Further east, things go by at an accelerating rate of hills/farm/suburb/city/eyesore/forest/ town/farm/city/suburb/forest, and so on, and shortly before we fetch up in D.C. things become positively stroboscopic, with towntowneyesorehillssuburbcityfarmforesttownhills going by in a blur, shocking and entrancing and disorienting until suddenly the train stops and you disembark into a dark womb of a station and stagger out into a white marbled lobby and stumble out onto a high, columned portico and look out into a bright afternoon and there is the Capitol Building, the actual Capitol Building of countless movies and TV shows and books and magazines, looking right back at you, and it is as if that psychedelic train ride had hammered open the doors of your perception, allowing you to see this storied place with supernal clarity, and therefore compassion, and you realize that, despite the epic levels of cynicism and shortsightedness that permeate this place, despite people who think of themselves as being, in I.M. Banks words,” refreshingly unconcerned with the vulgar exigencies of veracity,” that our hopes and ideals are still vested in this place, that we still harbor some hope that those we choose to represent us might at least make a serious attempt at reconciling our differences, amplifying our commonalities, celebrating our impossible, maddening, aspirational Union.
Ahem. We rented a car, drove out of that place to the relatively serene and egalitarian utopia of the Annapolis boat show.

Getting In, Getting Out

Okay, maybe we did leave Galena a little later than we had meant to. What with tearful goodbyes, one more wistful look at the beautiful architecture, and deep reserves of a sluggish refusal to get going, we were about an hour-and-a-half behind schedule by the time we left the river behind us. But hey, this still left us over five hours to make the three-hour trip to Chicago. Gosh, I feel so naïve saying that, because as I now realize, large cities create a time/space anomaly that causes time to contract and miles to expand asymptotically as you approach the destination. So even as we pushed further and further over the speed limit, we seemed to get no closer, and we saw our reserve of time eroded away.
Checking for route alternatives was of no help; we saw the blue stripes indicating no-problem-you’ve-got-plenty-of-time gradually turning to the beige of uh-oh-there-might-be-a-problem-here, and then to the you-are-so-screwed bright red of an intractable clog on almost every road. After a while, it looked like someone had spilled ketchup on my phone.
But we persevered, jinking through cutoffs and detours, into the heart of the city, at which point I missed a crucial exit, and sent us into the vast underground maze that is Chicago’s unique contribution to malevolent freeway design. It goes on for miles, on up to three levels. Deeper and deeper we went, but our phone’s Map Lady Voice (MLV) thought we were still on surface streets, so she tried repeatedly to direct us to turns that did not exist. “In a quarter mile, turn right,” she said, then, “Make a U-turn,” then, “Turn left,” then, “Holy crap, where are we?”
Meanwhile we passed Dante and Virgil, who were on the side of the road, changing a tire on an old Fiat. We passed a street corner where a group of Morlocks were singing acapella. We finally headed down a dark tunnel. Gandalf was at the end of it, and as we approached he raised his staff and said, “You shall not pass! Try the exit onto Madison Street!” We followed his suggestion, and shortly came upon the Least Regulated Intersection in the World, still underground, but there was a glimmer of daylight on its far side. Christian managed to eel our way through a maelstrom of cars, trucks, and buses, and shot up a ramp to the surface. MLV was still a little stunned, and tried to get us onto a freight elevator in the Sears Tower, but she gradually regained her senses, and steered us towards the rental car return. The clock was still ticking down, but it looked like we would catch the train.
Unfortunately, the return was, for some reason, located on the third floor of a hotel parking garage. With shall we say minimal signage. At rush hour. Suffice it to say that by the time we fought our way out of the building it was nearly time for the train to depart. No problem, we just called Lyft, who sent The Only Driver in Chicago Who Doesn’t Know Where Union Station Is. While he pawed futilely at his phone map, we woke up our dear MLV, who was in no mood for slackness. In the sweet, soulless, carefully modulated voice that we all know and love, she said, “Get this miserable excuse for a cab over to Canal Street. Turn right here, or I swear I will control alt delete your sorry ass.” Or something like that.
We raced into the station, running down the same stairs that Kevin Costner had such a festive time on in the “Untouchables,” ran to the train, and collapsed into our seats just as it headed out. And so to bed.