Voyage of Valdesca: a Drascombe longboat: June 2010

I thought I'd share here a speech I gave last year at this time at the Albany Academy for Girls commencement. My niece Hannah was graduating. I was celebrating my 35th reunion. My father, his 70th from the Albany Academy, the boys' school across the road. Brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces have also graduated from the two schools. The reason I think this is relevant here is it expresses some of what drove me to find Valdesca and sail her this winter in the Sea of Cortes. This morning, I dug this out to remind myself.

AAG Commencement Address, June 8, 2009
by Claudia J Lewis

Today, I’d like to put out there some themes that have emerged in my life in the 35 years since I sat here in MY white dress. Hopefully, those of you graduating today will find something of value here as you go about your lives and make all the decisions ahead of you about what courses to take in college, what major to declare, whether to continue beyond a bachelor’s degree, whether to have a career or family or both, whether to be a hippie vegan back-to-nature dirt farmer or a suit-wearing, Lexus-driving, banking maven. The themes I’ll put forward—that I’ve come to value—are perseverance, self-reliance, community, and Nature, as in that thing we think we’ve conquered but in fact we depend on for our very existence.

I’ll start out with what I don’t want to talk about—cancer. Although I have been fighting cancer for 5 years, I don’t want to be defined by cancer. In fact, I’m trying hard to find definition beyond cancer. I live with it every day—an endless cycle of doctors’ appointments, treatments, annoying side effects, medical tests, reports to friends and family. An endless cycle of ups and downs—but surprisingly more up than down.

I also don’t want to be defined too narrowly by my resume, or my biography. Sufficit to say, I am privileged, as all of you are. Yes, I have worked hard. But up to a certain point, accidents of birth and connections make more difference than hard work. Going to the Academy gives you a leg up on college admissions. And once you go to, say, Brown, that helps get you into a Cal State Los Angeles master’s program with no background whatsoever in the sciences. And having done that, it’s not that much of a reach to get into Harvard. And in my interview for a Fulbright Fellowship, one of the evaluators (who was at Caltech) said, “Well, you seem to have come out of nowhere scientifically. But if you’re good enough for Harvard, I’ll put you forward for a Fulbright.”

All of which isn’t to say that training for my profession was a cake walk. There were plenty of 70-hour weeks. However, in some ways it has been a matter of just putting one foot in front of the other. As Woody Allen once said, “Ninety percent of life is about just showing up.” To get a PhD takes perseverance more than IQ. It takes believing in yourself, believing that you are capable of original thought.

For a scientist, I’ve actually had a rather checkered career. No straight and narrow for me! In college, I chickened out of majoring in geology because in my FIRST geology class the professor wrote some differential equations on the blackboard and said that those of us who hadn't had physics and calculus yet didn't really need to worry (I worried).I didn't even know what calculus was. So I majored in American Civilization. It wasn't until after college, while I was working at a small wood energy research lab in Santa Fe, that I discovered I could do science. One task I had was to run experiments on creosote buildup in different kinds of woodstove chimney. I set up 6 identical Fisher Baby Bear woodstoves with identical lengths of chimney but different kinds of insulation. Then I fired the 6 Baby Bears for two months straight, loading each one with an identical, weighed quantity of newspaper, kindling, and cordwood. This required chopping cords and cords of firewood, taking care to get all the pieces the same size. At the end, I dismantled the chimneys, dried them in a low-temperature oven, weighed them, and compared them to their original weights to get the creosote accumulation. And we published a paper in 'Mother Earth News'. I realized that there was no mystery to doing science. I was good at it! So I took evening courses in College Algebra, Calculus (!!!), Physical Geology, and Chemistry. After that, I knew I was ready to get the geology degree I always wanted.

I finished my master’s degree at Cal State in four years rather than the more typical two years because I had to do all the undergraduate geology courses and physics, chemistry, and calculus. I then went to Harvard for a PhD, which took five more years. For anybody counting, I went through 26th grade. I did my thesis research in Baja California, which took 11 months to complete, 11 months of camping out in the Sonoran desert. With a field assistant, we’d drive up a dry wash in the mountain range I was studying and find a place protected from flash floods, where we’d set up camp. Then for a week or so, we’d hike out every day in a different direction to map the rocks before changing camps. By now I think you can see how sticking with it can get you to your goals, despite your doubts about your abilities or how many times you have to move across the country.

One characteristic that ties it all together for me is that I have an openness to experience that isn’t unique but HAS determined my trajectory and impelled me through life. I’ve been willing to take risks, to follow my heart, to think for myself, and ignore the expectations of other people, though I had to learn to do these things. If you don’t open yourself up to making mistakes, you close yourself off to learning anything new. If you merely follow a pre-determined path, you’ll never really know what you’re made of.

More than anything or anyone, the wilderness, or Nature with a capital N, has been my guide and perpetual source of peace, inspiration and strength. My appreciation of the outdoors began a long time ago—camping out on islands in Lake George, waterskiing on a glass-calm lake not long after dawn, picking blueberries and swatting mosquitoes on Prospect Mountain. My first real experience of what nature could teach me about myself was the Outward Bound course I took at Hurricane Island after my junior year at the Academy. Twenty-one days of rain, sleeping on oars, navigating in pea-soup fog, rowing despite the blisters taught me I was pretty tough. I didn’t love the rain but I figured out how to stay warm and dry.

At some point, likely senior year, I came across a book in the Academy library that someone had had the good sense to buy. It was called “On the Loose” by Terry and Renny Russell, two brothers (not much older than me at the time) who put together a book of their photos, quotes from other authors, and wisdom of their own from their travels together on rivers, in the desert, and in the mountains. They rattled around in an old pickup truck and ran whitewater rivers and climbed peaks and played the guitar on the beach. “On the Loose” became a kind of prescription or exhortation for me. I wanted to do what they did, but in my own way.

After my freshman year at Brown, I had a summer job at Hurricane Island doing logistics from a subsidiary island base near Bar Harbor, ME; I had to provide all the food and gear for 36 students and 8 staff. Mind you, I was 19 years old and I had no idea how much 17 year old boys eat. I nearly caused a mutiny. After working two summers at Hurricane Island, I signed on for a 3-month trip sailing and rowing from Maine to Florida, with other Hurricane staff, on a 30-ft-long, open boat (basically a glorified coast guard life boat). We left Hurricane in early October, in the late afternoon, and ran smack into a storm. We sailed all night, waves crashing over us as we huddled in our foul weather gear. I remember sunrise vividly; the wind had died down and we made a pot of coffee on our two-burner gas stove and dug into the brownies we had made before leaving Hurricane. Fortunately, things never got MORE exciting than our first night, though we had lots of adventure.

As a junior at Brown, a group of kids I didn’t know found out I had worked for Outward Bound and asked me if I wanted to join their Group Independent Study Project on the Colorado River. We would get academic credit for two semesters. And we would spend 45 days in July and August on the Green and Colorado Rivers. The idea was to study the archeology, history, geology, environmental policy, art, music, and literature of the Colorado River drainage, a river that provides life-giving water to 7 arid western states, has some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet, and has seen history-making whitewater descents. After the river trip, we would synthesize what we learned and prepare an hour-long multi-media presentation for the Brown President’s Colloquium Series during commencement week.

As you might imagine, we had a blast. The six of us did the river in two inflatable rafts and a little hard plastic boat called a Sportyak. We had so much time—45 days!!—that we were able to hike up many side canyons and even take a backpacking trip into the Maze, in Canyonlands. We had so much time that some days we would decide just before sunset that we really were sick of this camp and so we’d throw everything in the boats and float a mile to a new camp. In retrospect, that was an amazingly unpretentious trip. It wasn’t about gear at all. We wore cutoffs and sneakers. It was about being on the river. It was about learning what the desert had to teach us. Was it worth 6 credits?

Aldo Leopold, in his book “A Sand County Almanac,” expressed the power of wilderness travel to teach us unforgettable lessons:

No servant brought them meals; they got their meat out of the river, or went without. No traffic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they misguessed whether or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes, which firewood made clean coals, and which only smoke. The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts…against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.

Terry and Renny Russell, from their experience of wilderness, learned a few things, too. Here’s a piece of theirs on wilderness travel from “On the Loose” that still sticks with me today:

So why do we do it?
What good is it?
Does it teach you anything?
Like determination? Invention? Improvisation?
Foresight? Hindsight?
Love?
Art? Music? Religion?
Strength or patience or accuracy or quickness or tolerance or
Which wood will burn and how long is a day and how far is a mile
And how delicious is water and smoky green pea soup?
And how to rely on your self?

And how to rely on yourself. I’ve learned that in spades. Like the time in Baja California when we had both batteries, the main one and the backup, go dead. We felt that kind of uh-oh you feel when you realize this might not turn out the way we planned. There was just a thin veil of technology between us and total doom. We had to hike out 12 miles across the burning desert to the main road and hitchhike into San Felipe to get a new battery and find somebody to take us back to our vehicle, which was way off in the hinterland. The guy who took us back in was visibly nervous when I kept getting out of the vehicle to find the tracks we made in the sand on the way in.

So what does wilderness offer me at this stage of my life, if not the chance to be ever more self-reliant? For the last few months I have been reading books of nature writing—Edwin Way Teale, Ann Zwinger, Terry Tempest Williams, Ed Abbey, Ellen Meloy—most but not all writing about the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest desert. I’ve been feeling a deep need to connect to the natural world, but it’s a little hard to do on a chaise longue in my dining room. So I started reading about other people’s trips to wild places. Within the nature writing genre, there are different flavors and not all of them suit all occasions.

Some years ago I started a book by the author and naturalist Ann Zwinger. The book was called “Down Canyon”, about a year in which she took 12 trips through the Grand Canyon, one a month. All those years ago, I didn’t get very far with Down Canyon. I wanted to read about whitewater, the big rapids that drive the pace and tenor of most days on the Grand.

But Zwinger scarcely mentions rapids. Her focus is near, detailed, contemplative. She describes the patterns of light on the water, the sound of birds just before dawn, the peregrinations of bugs on a sandy beach. When I read Down Canyon recently—really for the first time!—I realized how much of the Grand Canyon I didn’t see on my 4 raft trips through there. I was always focused on the whitewater—balancing the load on my raft each morning and tying everything carefully so that even upside down I wouldn’t lose a soda can; scrutinizing the river guide so I always knew where I was and what rapids were coming up; stopping to scout the biggest ones and throwing sticks in the current to plan a bombproof route past the big recirculating holes and stopper waves. I spent so much of each day in taut suspense at outcomes that I didn’t have time to really see.

These last few months, I’ve really longed to be on the river. Not just the Grand. Maybe the Grand least of all. Contemplative stretches, where I can float, and just look, and listen.

Since I’ve had cancer, I pay more attention to the details. Not the details that I used to obsess about in order to ensure the outcome I wanted. But the details of this moment—all the things that make this moment unique and lovely and worth living.

I bought a canoe recently. A 14-ft forest green-faded-to-teal Mad River canoe. A few weeks ago, Tim and I, with a couple of friends, floated a flatwater reach of the Rio Grande I’d never floated before. The banks of the river were lush with spring green. We saw ducks and redwing blackbirds and some goats in a pen, and blooming fruit trees, and a guy firing up his woodburning hot tub. We took out at Embudo Station, a restaurant right on the bank of the river, and had dinner and watched the river flow by.

The amazing thing about my illness is how much I’ve come to love and appreciate my friends and family. My cancer isn’t just about me. It affects, or afflicts, my whole community—my friends, my family, and my co-workers. As a self-reliant person, I had a hard time accepting help. At one point this winter, Tim and I were frazzled with trying to find anything I wanted to eat. We were down to about 8 things that I found appetizing. A friend of ours offered to organize cooks to bring us meals twice a week. What a difference that made! Hungarian mushroom soup. Salmon chowder. Moroccan lamb with melon balls and mint. This food tasted great; it was wrapped in love. And in a thousand other ways now, I know that I am loved.

So I’ve learned to be self reliant, but I have also come to appreciate the value of human community and, through my travels, the interconnectedness of all things in the natural world, including humans. As I have come to regard myself as a part of something much bigger than me, I feel like I get saner and make better decisions about my life and my needs on this Earth. Who needs more stuff? How about more time on the river with people I love? The writer Bill McKibben is a passionate advocate against the pursuit of MORE. The pursuit of ‘more’ does not make us happy. He prescribes a deep connection to nature as the antidote to the quintessentially American pursuit of more. McKibben says, “Interconnection is anathema to a consumer notion of the world, where each of us is useful precisely to the degree that we consider ourselves the center of everything. Advertising and hyperconsumerism are designed to make you crazy. Nature, like close-knit human community, is designed to help you stay sane.”

So the advice I have to offer you, senioritas, for what it’s worth, is to stick with your passion, don’t let anyone talk you out of pursuing your dreams, believe in yourself, help to build a resilient community around you, and look to the natural world for peace and sanity.

Best of luck on your journey.

Voyage of Valdesca: a Drascombe longboat

Saturday, June 19, 2010

The Keeper of the Eddystone Light

Friday, June 18, 2010

Peace

Exhultation is the going

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Reprise of 2009 commencement speech

Another bump in the road

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